Maria Antonella Pelizzari teaches courses in the History of Photography at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her expertise covers a wide range of subjects and time periods, including Italian photography and culture from its beginnings to the present, nineteenth-century British colonialism, American modernism, and the interdisciplinary dialogue between photography and architecture. She earned her PhD from the University of New Mexico. She has been Associate Curator of Photography at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, and she has held teaching positions at Concordia University in Montreal and Ryerson University in Toronto.
Prof. Pelizzari is the author of Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); Painting in Italy, 1910s-1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art (Turin: Allemandi, 2015) and the contributing author to exhibition catalogs and anthologies: Futurism 1909-1944. Reconstructing the Universe (2014); Paul Strand (2015); Lynne Cohen (2014); Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (2017); Luigi Ghirri: The Early Work (2018); Senza Margini (2021). She recently co-edited a volume for the Yale Center for British Art, The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840-1900 (2022).
She curated and edited, along with Hunter College MA and MFA students, 125th Street: Photography in Harlem (2021); Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947-Present (2017) and Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present (2012). While at the Canadian Centre for Architecture she curated an edited the catalog Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation (2003). This publication was awarded the “CAA British Art Historians Prize.”
She has published essays in Artforum, Millennium Film Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Aperture, History of Photography, Visual Resources, études photographiques, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Modern Italy, Modernism/Modernity.
She is currently working on a book project on the politics of photography in the printed media in 1930s Italy and she is co-editing an anthology, Print Matters: Histories of Photography in Illustrated Magazines (Getty Publications).