Valentina Gioia Levy

Accademia Italiana (Italy)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Curating dissonance: Fascist and colonial afterlives in Italian heritage across public space, museum narratives, and digital counter-archives

2026–2027: Fall

Valentina Gioia Levy is an art historian, curator, writer, and educator whose work explores the intersections of curatorial practice, visual culture, heritage, and the production of situated forms of knowledge. Her academic formation spans both European and Asian art histories, with an early focus on aesthetics and artistic exchanges between East and West. She studied Humanities at Sapienza University of Rome and received her PhD in Arts, Aesthetics and Art Sciences from Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne in 2025 with a dissertation on contextual curating and the transformations of contextual art in a multipolar world. She is an affiliated researcher at Institut ACTE (Arts, Créations, Théories, Esthétiques), Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne.

Combining scholarly research with over fifteen years of international curatorial practice, her work investigates how artistic and curatorial practices shape cultural narratives, negotiate social and political contexts, and contribute to the interpretation of places, objects, and collective memory. Her research spans curatorial studies, exhibition histories, visual culture, monumentality, heritage, and the circulation of images across global contexts.

She has developed research and curatorial projects throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, collaborating with institutions and initiatives including the Venice Biennale, Dak’Art Biennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, LAM360 Land Art Mongolia, Something Else Cairo, Manifesta 12, MAXXI, MACRO, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. She is also the founder of GAD – Giudecca Art District in Venice and co-founder of the interdisciplinary platform ALL FAD.

Gioia Levy teaches at Accademia Italiana in Rome and has served as Visiting Professor at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Her forthcoming book, Le tournant contextuel: Art, territoires et curatelle à l’ère de la multipolarité (L’Harmattan, 2026), develops a theoretical framework for understanding contextual curatorial practice in contemporary global art.

At the Italian Academy, she will pursue research on the afterlives of twentieth-century Italian heritage, examining how monuments, architecture, archives, and curatorial frameworks shape the interpretation, preservation, and re-signification of difficult histories in the present.