Summer Faculty Announced

IDSVA’s internationally renowned philosophers, artists, and scholars join students at residency sites, leading seminar discussions and fieldwork that explore each location's historical, aesthetic, and ideological significance. They bring cutting-edge research and diverse global perspectives directly into the learning experience.

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Giuliana Bruno (Visiting Faculty) Spannocchia

GIULIANA BRUNO is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Research Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, internationally known for her research on intersections of the visual arts, architecture, the environment, and media. Her influential works include Atmospheres of Projection (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Surface (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Public Intimacy (MIT press, 2007), Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Atlas of Emotion (Verso, 2002), winners of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Kraszna-Krausz book awards. She has contributed to major contemporary art publications from the Guggenheim, Whitney, and MoMA, and co-authored monographs on Wael Shawky, Isaac Julien, and Lina Bo Bardi. Bruno is a Member of the Steering Committee of Fondazione Prada and lectures in museums and universities worldwide.

Howard Caygill (Core Faculty) Athens

HOWARD CAYGILL is a philosopher and cultural historian educated at the UK’s Bristol, Sussex, and Oxford Universities. Most recently serving on the faculties of Goldsmiths, Kingston, and Paris VIII, Howard Caygill is the author of several acclaimed books, including A Kant Dictionary (Wiley-Blackwell, 1995); Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge, 1998); On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury, 2013); Kafka: In Light of the Accident (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) and most recently, Force and Understanding. Writings on Philosophy and Resistance (Bloomsbury Press, 2020). He is currently working on the philosophy and aesthetics of the Anthropocene and the role of philosophy in curating and interpreting the art produced by inmates of mental hospitals during the first half of the Twentieth Century. He lives between Athens and Barton-on-Sea on the coast of England.

Arne De Boever (Visiting Faculty) Venice

ARNE DE BOEVER teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, where he directed the MA Aesthetics and Politics program. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and translations, as well as seven books on contemporary comparative fiction and political and aesthetic philosophy. His most recent books are Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), Being Vulnerable (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), and Post-Exceptionalism: Art after Political Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). In Venice, he will present "Musical Sketching," a lecture within Biennale Sessions, open to the public, on how the minor, unexceptional key opens a path towards an alternative politics of art.

Jason Hoelscher (Post-Doc Fellow) Spannocchia

JASON HOELSCHER is Gallery Director and Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at Georgia Southern University. Hoelscher received an MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute and a PhD in Visual Art (Aesthetics and Art Theory) from IDSVA, where he completed his dissertation under the supervision of Brian Massumi. His book Art as Information Ecology was published by Duke University Press in 2021 and nominated for the American Society of Aesthetics “Outstanding Monograph” award in 2022. Hoelscher has exhibited his paintings worldwide and has written for such publications as Burnaway, ARTnews, ArtPulse, and ArtCore Journal.

Dejan Lukić (Core Faculty) Athens, Venice

DEJAN LUKIĆ is a writer and philosopher trained as an anthropologist (PhD, Columbia University, 2007). His work moves between art theory, natural philosophy, and cosmological inquiry. At the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), he teaches philosophical anthropology, leads doctoral seminars, and directs international residencies. He is currently completing Deranged Vivarium, a multi-volume manuscript exploring relations between thought, atmosphere, mineral worlds, and nonhuman life; the first volume is forthcoming with Distanz Verlag (Berlin). He lives and works in the high desert of New Mexico.

Franca Marini (Visiting Faculty) Siena

FRANCA MARINI is an Italian international artist with degrees from Istituto d'Arte Duccio di Boninsegna, Siena, Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She lived and worked in New York City for over ten years, exhibiting in personal and group shows, carrying out public art commissions, and participating in film festivals and cultural events in Europe, the United States, Central America, and Palestine. Now working in site-specific installations and video art, her work addresses urban settings and human rights issues. She currently teaches Painting at the Siena School for Liberal Arts / Siena Art Institute.

Silvia Mazzini (Core Faculty) Rome, Spannocchia

SILVIA MAZZINI, philosopher and playwright, works on the intersection of aesthetics and political philosophy. As a scholar, she has researched and published on art and politics in Pasolini, Bloch, and Vattimo, on comic thought and community theatre. She is currently completing her book Philosophy of Poverty. Before joining IDSVA, she worked i.a. at Humboldt University Berlin (where she also earned her PhD), Berlin University of the Arts, at the University of Groningen and was a visiting fellow at the ICI Berlin. She also collaborated with various theatre companies, including those for young audiences, and has experimented with narrative essays, performative lectures, and hybrid artistic forms.

Simonetta Moro (Core Faculty) Spannocchia, Venice

SIMONETTA MORO is a visual artist and scholar focusing on painting, drawing, and mapping practices. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally; publications include Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art: Poetic Cartography (Routledge, 2021) and The Vattimo Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Moro holds a PhD in Fine Arts, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK; an MA in European Fine Arts, Winchester School of Art, UK; and a BFA in Painting Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, Italy. She currently lives between New York City and northern Italy.

George Smith (Core Faculty) Spannocchia

GEORGE SMITH founded the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in 2006. Professor Smith writes on literature, the visual arts, visual culture, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy of education. He is the author of The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy (Routledge, 2018), The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics (Routledge, 2021), and The Artist-Philosopher in the Age of Addiction (Routledge, 2025).

Elina Staikou (Visiting Faculty) Athens

ELINA STAIKOU is a philosopher and transdisciplinary scholar who has taught the history of ideas, philosophy, and liberal arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Winchester, UK. Her research focuses on deconstruction, critical maternities, life sciences, and the ethico-aesthetics of decomposition. She is the author of Deconstruction at Home: Metaphors of Travel and Writing (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2011) and articles on philosophy, literature, and biomedicine, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Derrida Today. She has participated in numerous international conferences and several IDSVA symposia with talks on migration, hospitality, the ethics of eating, and the Nitrogen Anthropocene.

Shara Wasserman (Visiting Faculty) Rome

SHARA WASSERMAN is an American art historian and curator of contemporary art, and the director of the Temple Rome Gallery of Art at Temple University in Rome, where she is also a faculty member in the Art History program. Wasserman has curated numerous international exhibitions in public and institutional spaces.