Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, American Academy in Rome
Before joining the American Academy in Rome in 2023 as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, Ilaria Puri Purini worked as an assistant curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and then as curator of programmes at the Contemporary Art Society in London for over a decade. There she curated exhibitions around craft, art and the intersection of the two, notably ‘Ab ovo / On Patterns’ – a show of textiles and performance art by the Italian artist Adelaide Cioni at Mimosa House – and co-curated the acclaimed exhibition ‘Pioneers: Morris and the Bauhaus’ at the William Morris Gallery in London. She is an expert on museums and acquisitions practices, and in 2022 coedited the Contemporary Arts Society’s resource Doing the Work: Embedding Anti-Racism and Decolonisation in Museum Practice (2022).