Ana-Maria Milcic

Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria) 

Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art 

Borderland modernities in the Adriatic: women, art and institutions from the Habsburgs to the Italian Fascists, 1900–1939 

2026–2027: Spring

Ana is an art historian and curator specializing in early twentieth-century European avant-garde and modernist art. She studied art history and English language and literature at the University of Rijeka, where she completed both her BA and MA degrees. In 2022, she completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London with a thesis titled “D’Annunzio’s Futurists: Fiume from 1914 to 1934”, supported by a Courtauld Scholarship and a Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England award. During and after her doctorate, she combined research, teaching, and curatorial work, holding teaching posts at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Northwestern Polytechnic in Canada. From 2023, she worked as Senior Research Officer at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in London, where she continues as a consultant and recently curated the exhibition “Disruptors: Fractured Images and Migrant Wordl” (2026). Until December 2026, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), where she was working on her first book, From Habsburg Corpus Separatum to Imperial Afterlives: Visual Politics and Art in Fiume. Her research has appeared in journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues, including International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Peristil, and Immediations.

Her time at the Italian Academy will be dedicated to developing a new research project on women artists and their position within art institutions and spaces in the port cities of Fiume (Rijeka), Capodistria (Koper), and Trieste during the first half of the twentieth century, as these towns moved through the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, geopolitical ambiguity, paramilitary occupation, and the formation of new nation-states.