Katerina is a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance art. She completed her PhD in art history and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. She has spent two years as a Kress Foundation Institutional Fellow at the Warburg Institute and a year as a Curatorial Fellow in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the three years prior to joining the Courtauld, she taught as a lecturer at Birkbeck, the University of Exeter, and the University of Birmingham.
Katerina’s work to date has examined the representation of dead and dying bodies in Italy circa 1400 to1550. Her research shows that Renaissance artists represented the transient moment of death in painting, sculpture, and print, and that they were compelled to do so by a pervasive emphasis placed on this moment by popular culture.
Her forthcoming project unearths the lost significance of breath in late medieval and Renaissance Europe by examining how the fundamental connection between life and breath was explored in both religious and artistic practice.
Teaching
MA Special option: The Body and Experience in Renaissance Art (with Dr Robert Brennan and Dr Felix Jäger)
BA1: Varieties of Renaissance Art
BA3: The Manifestations of Power
Interests
- late medieval and Renaissance art and society
- art and death
- the representation of time
- medieval and Renaissance women as artists and viewers
- the history of emotions
Publications
“Sculpting the ‘ebbing after-life of death’ in Renaissance Italy,” special issue, Religion and the Arts 27, no. 1 (‘Do This In Remembrance of Me’: Religion, Memory, and Art) (March 2025): 7-48
“Michelangelo’s Left-Hand Man: Minding the Gap in Sebastiano del Piombo’s Viterbo Pietà.” Comitatus 55 (2024): 125-158
“Two Death Masks Made of Earth and Absences (to Make Hearts Grow Fonder),” in Dead or Alive! Tracing the Animation of Matter in Art and Visual Culture, eds. Gunhild Borggreen, Maria Fabricius Hansen and Rosanna Tindbæk (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2020), 197-237