Rachel E. Boyd

Columbia University (U.S.A.)

Making and performing the Nativity scene in Italy

2020-2021: Fall

Rachel E. Boyd received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University in 2020. Her dissertation, “Invention, Collaboration, and Authorship in the Renaissance Workshop: The Della Robbia Family and Italian Glazed Terracotta Sculpture, ca. 1430–1566,” examined artistic techniques, modes of production, and transmission of craft knowledge within a four-generation workshop.

Dr. Boyd is the 2017–2020 David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; previously, she was Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. She also pursued a research exchange with the University of Glasgow’s Technical Art History Group, focusing on techniques for the examination of polychrome sculpture. Museum experience includes recent curatorial internships at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Boston, she contributed research for the 2016–2017 exhibition “Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence.”

Dr. Boyd earned her B.A. in the history of art and Italian at Yale University. She received her M.Phil. in the history of art and architecture from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.