Maria Elena Versari is Visiting Professor of Art History and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore, where she received a PhD in Art History with a doctoral dissertation devoted to the international relations of Futurism. She has published two monographs, Constantin Brancusi (Florence, 2005) and Wassily Kandinsky e l’astrattismo (Florence 2007; French tr. 2008; Portuguese tr. 2011), edited the republication of Ruggero Vasari’s Futurist dystopian dramas L’angoscia delle macchine e altre sintesi futuriste (Palermo 2009) and has written extensively on Futurism, Avant-garde internationalism, Cubism, Fascist aesthetics and architecture, and twentieth-century sculpture. In 2016, she edited and co-translated the first English-language edition of Boccioni’s 1914 Futurist Painting Sculpture for the Getty Research Institute Publications and has co-curated Totally Lost, an EU-sponsored exhibition devoted to totalitarian architecture and urban memory involving 186 international photographers and mapping 300 locations worldwide. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Foreign Policy of the Avant-garde and pursuing research for a second book on political iconoclasm in the 20th century.
