Virginia Marano, Charlotte Matter and Laura Valterio are art historians based in Switzerland. Their research project “Rethinking Art History through Disability” aims to rethink the intersections of disability theory and art history through the lens of the non-normative body, focusing on the notion of functional diversity. Since 2020, they have organized a series of public events, including artists and curators talks, a reading group, a lecture series, and a workshop with international scholars.
Virginia Marano (she/her) completed her PhD in art history at the University of Zurich. Her thesis examined the diasporic dimension in the works of Jewish women sculptors in Post-war New York, previously assimilated to feminism but not yet connected to the question of exile. In 2022, she was a SNSF Doc.Mobility fellow in the Art History Department at Hunter College/CUNY.
Charlotte Matter (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Art History, where she coordinates the specialized Master’s program in Art History in a Global Context. Her doctoral thesis explored the use of plastics in art of the 1960s and 1970s from a feminist perspective. Her current research interests include collectivity in art and intersectional approaches.
Laura Valterio (she/her) is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Zurich. Previously she was an assistant to the director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max-Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and a graduate fellow at the NCCR eikones – Iconic Criticism at the University of Basel. Her PhD project explores the history of seventeenth century Italian painting from the point of view of raw materials, to examine how their life cycle and circulation enabled processes of intermedial exchange and knowledge transfer among different spheres of production.
