The UVA Department of Art is delighted to welcome Giulia Paoletti as Assistant Professor of African Art. A specialist in African photography and African art more broadly, Paoletti has extensive curatorial experience, most notably as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her 2015 exhibition In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa, which she co-curated at the Metropolitan Museum, presented one hundred years of portrait photography in West Africa. The exhibition overlapped with her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, which focused on the history of photography in Senegal from 1860-1960. Approaching the medium from a variety of angles—from the historical to the contemporary; from Sufi Islamic to secular portraiture; and from medium specificity to intermediality—her work has appeared in edited volumes and academic journals including the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Tribal Arts, and African Arts. Her research was supported by awards and fellowships from, among others, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, and the Pratt Institute; and she has lectured widely in this country and abroad. She will be teaching a seminar entitled Histories of Photography in Africa to UVA undergraduates this Fall.