Summer School in Contemporary Art and Curatorship 
From documenta to the Biennale

Silvia Burini

Programme Director

Silvia Burini is Professor of History of Contemporary Art, History of Russian Art and Curatorship at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Elena Agudio

Elena Agudio (PhD) is art historian and curator. Between 2013 and 2022 she has been artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary – The Laboratory of Form-Ideas. She also writes and teaches, currently being theory lecturer at the Master Degree in Spatial Strategies at the Weißensee School of Art in Berlin. In 2017 and 2018 she was Guestprofessor at HFBK in Hamburg and Resident Fellow at Helsinki University of the Arts. The principal concerns of her practice are: migration and diasporic belonging, decanonisation, feminisms, ecological and planetary habitability, and the creation of sustainable infrastructures for and with vulnerable communities. Since December 2022 she is the new director of Villa Romana in Florence.

Among the last curated and co-curated projects: Latitude on Air: Unsettling Power Relations (radio festival with Goethe-Institut and reboot.fm); Exlamating Still! On the Noise of Images (Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography); SAVVY FUNK. An iteration of Every Time A Ear di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, in collaboration with Documenta 14 and Deutschlandfunk).

Manuela Lietti

Manuela Lietti is an independent art critic and curator specializing in contemporary Asian art who lives and works between Beijing and Milan. Since 2003, she has been active as a curator, critic, and coordinator of gallery and museum exhibitions, as well as public art projects in China and abroad.

Manuela is the curator of the 2024 programme of Capsule Venice, the Venetian branch of Capsule Shanghai. 

As a curator, she has worked with various institutions, including La Biennale di Venezia (Venice), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), the 2010 Carrara Sculpture Biennale (Carrara), the Chinese Ministry of Culture (Beijing), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), Galleria Continua (Beijing), Galleria Massimo De Carlo (Hong Kong), Cassina Projects (Milan), the 2019 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism /Architecture (Shenzhen). Her texts have appeared in numerous publications such as Arte e Critica, Artribune, Exibart, AAP, Flash Art International, Frieze, Artforum. For Skira she has curated Zhang Ruyi’s monograph.

Sara Mondini

Sara Mondini is an art historian specialised in the artistic productions - both ancient and modern - of South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, and Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture of West and South Asia in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. She is currently the Principal Investigator leading the five-year project The Mosques of Kerala: Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities (2023-2028), funded by the FWO with an Odysseus Type II grant.

Before joining Ghent University, Dr. Mondini collaborated as Adjunct Professor with various universities: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, (2009-2023), the FIT-Fashion Institute of Technology of New York at Milan Politecnico, Milan, (2016-2023), the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo” in Italy (2022-2023), and the University of Granada in Spain (2010-2013), where she taught courses on South Asian Visual Culture and Islamic Art and Architecture.

Camilla Querin

Camilla Querin is Assistant Professor of Art History at Ohio Wesleyan University. She specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on Brazil. Her research, both academic and curatorial, focuses on the intersection of visual arts with politics across the Americas, from the independence movements of the nineteenth century in Latin America to Latinx activist art in the U.S. today.  

She has curated exhibitions and worked in museums in New York and Los Angeles, and earned her doctorate in Art History at the University of California, Riverside, where she was UCR's inaugural Fellow at the California Museum of Photography. She holds a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Museum Studies from New York University, and a master’s degree in Economics and Management in Arts, Culture, Media and Entertainment from Bocconi University. Her writings have appeared in “Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture”, “Modos: Revista de História da Arte”, and the “Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction".

Maria Redaelli

Maria Redaelli is a post-doc research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where in 2022 she obtained a Ph.D. in History of the Arts with a thesis on New Media Art in Russia. At the same university, she acts as coordinator of the scientific secretariat of the Centre for Studies in Russian Art (CSAR). At the CSAR Centre, she co-managed various conferences, talks, and educational programmes. 

Since 2015 she has been assistant at CYLAND Media Art Lab for the exhibitions held at Ca’ Foscari in the framework of the Art Biennials. In 2019 she was assistant curator of the “12 Cyfest. ID. Art: Tech Exhibition” and in 2024 she is playing the same role for “CYFEST 15: Vulnerability”.

She co-curated the exhibition “Cercando il cuore” (Venice, 2023) and worked as assistant curator for the exhibition of Sergey Kischenko “Hortus Conclusus. Memoria Biodiversità Migrazione” (Venice, 2023) and for the exhibition “Uzbekistan: l’Avanguardia nel deserto” (Venice - Florence, 2024).