Dr. Virginia Marano

Virginia Marano is an art historian and curator whose work critically engages contemporary art through disability studies and the histories of architecture and design. She is currently a Junior Research Fellow in the Young Investigator Group Preparation Program (YIG Prep Pro) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and an associate scholar in the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects,” led by Anna-Maria Meister at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. She earned her PhD in art history from the University of Zurich, where her research was supported by an FCS doctoral scholarship (2018–2021) and a FAN research grant (2021). Her work has been further supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Doc.Mobility fellowship at the Art History Department at Hunter College, CUNY (2022), and by a fellowship at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (2023). Alongside her academic research, she worked as a curatorial assistant at MASI, Museo d’Arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano (2023–2025).

Her research mobilizes disability as a critical method for rethinking contemporary art and exhibition-making. At the intersection of art history, disability studies, and the histories of architecture, design, and technology, she reframes prosthetics, low- and high-tech objects, and accessibility infrastructures as transformative artistic and curatorial strategies. She is co-director of the research project “Rethinking Art History through Disability” at the University of Zurich.

Her writing has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, including Image & Text (2023), RACAR (2024), PAD – Pages on Arts & Design (2024), Third Text (2024), publications by Logos Verlag (2024), Hatje Cantz (2025), and the Journal of Design History (forthcoming, 2026).