Advisory Committee CCIII

Advisory Committee CCIII

  • Gillion Carrara, Director, Fashion Resource Center, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  • Daniela Degl’Innocenti, Curator, Museo del Tessuto di Prato
  • Carlotta Del Bianco, Founder Fellow, Romualdo Del Bianco – Life Beyond Tourism Foundation®, Florence
  • Susan North, Dress Historian, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
  • Roberta Orsi Landini, Costume & Textile  Historian, Florence
  • Alexandra Palmer, Nora E.Vaughan Senior Curator of Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada
  • Carlo Sisi, Art Historian, Florence
  • Rosalia Varoli-Piazza, Special Advisor to the Director General of ICCROM and Art Historian, Rome
  • Mary Westerman Bulgarella, Costume & Textile Conservator, Researcher and Consultant, Florence

Brief biographies of Advisory Committee members:

Gillion Carrara is director of the Fashion Resource Center of The  School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, as adjunct professor, she teaches the Shape of Contemporary Dress. She has published book reviews in Dress, the journal of the Costume Society of America and spoken on topics of contemporary and avant-garde dress at regional and national CSA symposiums. Her exhibition critiques of ‘Dior:The New Look’ (Chicago History Museum, 2006-7) and ‘4 Lines:a Fashion Exhibition and Installation‘ (SAIC Fashion Resource Center, 2007) were published in Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Berg Publisher, Oxford, England, vol. 13, nos.1&3). She is a frequent speaker at the Alliance Francasie, the Arts Club of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. Gillion presented ‘Scattered Remnants in the Present’ at the first Costume Colloquium: a Tribute to Janet Arnold in 2008 and ‘Soundsuits – Nick Cave in Dance’ at Costume Colloquium II: Dress for Dance.

Daniela Degl’Innocenti graduated from the University of Florence with a major in textile history. Since 1997 she has been curator of the Textile Museum of Prato where she oversees the conservation and preservation of the Museum’s collection as well as their permanent and temporary exhibitions. More recently she has organized the exhibitions ‘Intrecci mediterranei. Il tessuto come dizionario di rapporti economici, culturali e sociali‘ (2006), ‘Thayaht. Un artista alle origini del Made in Italy’ (2007) and ‘Lo stile dello zar. Arte e moda tra Italia e Russia dal XIV al XVIII secolo’ (2009), in collaboration with the Hermitage State Museum. She has published many studies on textile studies and continues to conduct courses at the University of Florence, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and Polimoda. In the international arena she has collaborated with a United Nations project in the Gabinete de Conservaciòn y restauraciòn de La Habana (Cuba) as docent for the course ‘Conservaciòn y restauraciòn de textiles’ (2003). Daniela lectured at the first international conference on textile conservation held in San Paolo, Brasile  entitled ‘Tecidos e sua conservação no Brasil: museus e coleções‘ (2006).

Carlotta Del Bianco is Founder Fellow and Board member of the Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation® in Florence. Her interests in costume stem from her university research on theatrical costume of Edward Gordon Craig, 19th-20th century British set and costume designer. Prior to receiving her University degree she collaborated with the Stibbert Museum reordering the costume collection and after she worked on the cataloging of the photographic archive of the Medici Burial Clothes. Carlotta’s particular career path has taken her into promoting occasions for the international and inter-cultural exchange among specialists and students in artistic and cultural fields. Since 2006 she has had an active role in defining the orientation of Life Beyond Tourism® which is promoted the Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation®. She is an active member of the ICOMOS Italian Committee (International Council of Monuments and Sites) and since 2008 is in charge of the coordination of their Italian youth committee. Recently she has become an Associate Member of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration (TheoPhilos).

Roberta Orsi Landini, textile and costume scholar, has worked for over 20 years on the textile and costume collections at the Pitti Palace in Florence.  She is author of numerous articles, essays and books and has collaborated with an array of public institutions and museums in Italy and abroad.  From the onset of the Galleria del Costume in 1983 she has collaborated on several projects, exhibitions and publications, among which ‘Moda alla corte dei Medici’, on the conserved Medici burial clothes and ‘I principi bambini’, on court infant clothing. For the Stibbert Museum she conceived and curated the exhibition and catalog entitled ‘L’abito per il corpo. Il corpo per l’abito‘, which confronted western and Islamic dress. Roberta instigated and oversaw for many years the didactic activities of the Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio and the Roberto Capucci Foundation in Florence. Her most recent book publication, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580: lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza, is a culmination of her meticulous and accurate detailed dress research on archival documents and coeval imagery. Forthcoming is her next book, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580 Lo stile di Cosimo I de’ Medici.

Susan North joined the V&A Museum in 1995 and has been working as Curator of Fashion 1550-1800.  She co-authored Historical Fashion in Detail: the 17th & 18th Centuries with Avril Hart in 1998 and Style & Splendour: the Wardrobe of Queen Maud of Norway, with Anne Kjellberg in 2005.  At the V&A Susan has curated ‘Patterns of Fashion’ in honour of Janet Arnold in 1999, ‘Papiers à la mode – Paper Fashions‘ in 2000, ‘Style & Splendour: Queen Maud of Norway’s Wardrobe 1896-1938’ in 2005, and ‘Magnificence of the Tsars’ in 2008. She has an MA in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute and an undergraduate degree in Art History.  Prior to becoming a dress historian, Susan worked for seven years at the National Archives of Canada and two years at the National Gallery of Canada.  She is currently on leave from the V&A working on a doctorate at Queen Mary, University of London.  The subject of her research is dress and hygiene in early modern England.

Alexandra Palmer received her BA in Art History (University of Toronto,1979), her MA in Costume and Textiles (New York University, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1981), and her PhD in Design History (University of Brighton,1994).  Since 1996 she has been the Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator of Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada.  She has contributed to international museum catalogs including ‘The Golden Age: Haute Couture 1947-1957‘, V&A, London (2007); ‘RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion’, Benaki Museum, Athens (2007); ‘Christian Dior et le Monde’, Musée Dior, Granville (2006); and ‘Un Secolo di Moda’, Villa Medici, Rome (2003). She has edited and authored chapters in Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (2005), and Fashion: A Canadian Perspective (2004). She has contributed to a wide range of scholarly books including La Moda in Canada (2008), Framing Our Past: Constructing Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (2001), and The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (1999). Her book Couture & Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (2001) won a Clio Award for Ontario history, and Dior: A New Look, A New Enterprise 1947-57 (2009) won the 2010 Millia Davenport Publication Award. Alexandra is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and the Exhibition Editor for Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.

Carlo Sisi, illustrious scholar and art historian, was director of the Gallery of Modern Art and the Costume Gallery at the Pitti Palace in Florence. Since 1998 he has been president of the Marino Marini Museum in Florence. Parallel to his directorship and curatorial activities, he has been, and continues to be, involved in promoting our knowledge of 19th and 20th century art through numerous exhibitions and initiatives. His particular focus is on the figurative culture of these centuries with a recall to the Tuscan Quattro and Cinquecento, about which he has dedicated several texts and contributions in exhibition catalogs. He has coordinated related bibliographic lists in the publications on the 19th and 20th centuries in The History of Italian Painting edited by Electa. Among the many exhibitions that he has organized and coordinated, of note are “La pittura di paesaggio in Italia: l’Ottocento” (2003), “I Macchiaioli. Prima dell’Impressionismo” (2004), “Giovanni Boldini” (2005), “Paesaggi, pretesti dell’anima”(2005), and “Cezanne a Firenze” (2007). Carlo was a member of the Advisory Committee for Costume Colloquium: Dress for Dance.

Rosalia Varoli-Piazza was educated in art history at the University of Rome and received an MA at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  For 26 years she was Director/Coordinator of art history, and responsible for the textile conservation section at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. She has pioneered interdisciplinary approaches to numerable art conservation projects, among which is the international     pilot    project   of  “The Minimal    Opening of   Emperor Federick II’s Sarcophagus in the Palermo Cathedral” of which she is editor of the published results. In 2002 she was promoted to ICCROM from the Istituto, in agreement with the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italy). Here she has been a Senior Program Coordinator, overseeing the courses of ‘Sharing Conservation Decisions’ (2002, 2004 and 2006). She has also been a consultant for the French Ministry of Culture for the restoration of the Salon d’Apollon at the Louvre, and the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles and has published on a variety of subjects including the theory of conservation. She has had a long involvement with several international organizations for textiles and conservation including ICOM-CC (Member of the Directory Board,1996-1999 and Coordinator of the Textiles Working Group,1996-2002) IIC (Fellow), and CIETA. Currently Rosalia is Special Adviser to the Director-General of ICCROM.

Mary Westerman Bulgarella received her BFA in Art History (1973) and MFA in Art Conservation (1976) and subsequently trained and specialized in the conservation, display and research of textile and costumes.  Her professional work focuses not only on interventions and their documentation but also on the problems pertaining to the research of material and methods storage and display and she has published many essays on a variety of related subjects. She helped set up the Textile and Costume Conservation Laboratory at the Pitti Palace where she was employed for over 20 years.  There from 1983 to 1993 she worked with a team of international experts on the conservation of the Medici burial clothes, on which she has written several articles and given numerous lectures.  Mary has studied, taught, lectured at as well as collaborated with an array of museums and institutions in Italy and abroad. She is presently a freelance conservation consultant and researcher as well as organizer of conferences on significant textile and costume themes and coordinator of the Costume Colloquium Advisory Committee.


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