Studio Incamminati Welcomes our New Executive Director, Sheila Barker, Ph.D.
Studio Incamminati is pleased to announce Sheila Barker, PhD, as its new Executive Director.
Barker has a distinguished career in the world of art and academics. She is best known for having founded in 2010, and then directing, the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists at the Medici Archive Project in Florence, Italy. In her various roles at the Medici Archive Project between 2005 and 2022, she co-designed the first online and on-site educational programs; she directed the first research program; she oversaw the Medici Archive Project book series with Lund Humphries; and she founded and directed Friends of the Medici Archive Project, the organization’s fundraising and outreach program, along with its acclaimed Tuesday Ten Talks. Barker started her career as a gallery manager for Robert Simon Fine Art in New York and as the Clowes Curatorial Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (now Newfields). Currently, she is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is a Special Member of the Graduate Faculty of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland.
“On behalf of the board of directors, I am delighted to welcome Sheila Barker to Studio Incamminati as our next Executive Director,” said Daniels. “Since beginning our search, we’ve had the privilege of getting to know many distinguished leaders in the arts field. Sheila’s vision and optimism were unparalleled, and we’re confident she will advance the Studio’s mission for the next generation while building on the foundation of artistic and academic excellence.”
“It is a tremendous honor to have been selected as the next Executive Director of Studio Incamminati,” Barker said. “I am committed to sustaining Nelson Shanks’s humanist vision. In today’s world of AI, CGI, and screen fatigue, there is greater need than ever for the skill of seeing and true craftsmanship. When our students learn to see the world for themselves—and not through devices and mechanical media—they are also learning to think for themselves and to make meaningful connections with their community and the environment around them. I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to the board for this tremendous opportunity to join in the tradition of excellence that Studio Incamminati embodies.”
Barker’s archival scholarship has defined her as an internationally recognized expert on pioneering women artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. She has also contributed to other areas of Italian history, including the cultural response to plagues (for which she won the CAA’s Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize in 2005), women’s history, and the rise of early modern medicine. Her scholarly publications include four edited books, an exhibition catalog, and her monograph Artemisia Gentileschi (Getty Publications, 2022), which featured in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend review of books. The exhibition she curated for the Uffizi Galleries in 2020, The Immensity of the Universe in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni, received global news coverage.
Barker is a native of Houston, Texas, and lived in Florence, Italy, from 2004 until 2018. Barker graduated from Amherst College Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1993. She earned her PhD (2002) in Art History at Columbia University.