Claudia Cieri Via is full professor in Iconography and Iconology and Theory of Art at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Her research is mainly in the field of artistic culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She has published widely on Renaissance art, with particular reference to the mythological tradition in the artistic production and painting collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research on criticism and art theory in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries has focused on iconological tradition and specifically on the ideas of Aby Warburg.

Elsie Ivancich Dunin is Professor Emerita (Dance Ethnology), University of California at Los Angeles and currently based in Croatia as a dance research advisor with Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. Her studies have focused on dance events among the Croatian Diaspora in the United States (California), in South America (Chile), compared with source communities in Croatia; documentation of Romani (Gypsy) dance events in Macedonia, 1967-1997; and the study of sword dance contexts in Croatia, 1997-2004. She is the editor of various conference proceedings and dance research publications.

László Felföldi is Scientific Vice-Director of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and Director of the Folk Dance Department. As an ethnochoreologist, his fieldwork of over 25 years has dealt primarily with the folk dance tradition of national minorities in Hungary and of Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries. His current research includes traditional dance culture as indicator of social change, and individual (performer) creativity. His other interests include dance history and database cataloguing of pictorial sources. Dr. Felföldi has edited numerous volumes and journals and has published widely including articles on the connections of music and dance, and of folk dance and pictures.

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Nancy G. Heller is a Professor of Art History at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her most recent books are Why a Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 2002) and the 4th revised-and-expanded edition of Women Artists: An Illustrated History (Abbeville Press, 2004). Since 1984 she has been a student, teacher, performer, lecturer, and writer about the various types of Spanish dance. Dr. Heller has received research awards from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the government of Spain.

Adrienne L. Kaeppler is Curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C.. She has carried out field research in Tonga, Hawai`i, and other parts of the Pacific. Her research focuses on the interrelationships between social structure and the arts, especially dance, music, and the visual arts and she has published widely on these subjects. See, for example, her Hula Pahu: Hawaiian Drum Dances and Poetry in Motion: Studies in Tongan Dance. She is currently working on books on the social history of early English museums, Tongan material culture, and Hawaiian art. She is co-editor of the 1998 Oceania volume of Garland World History of Music.

Irene Loutzaki is a social anthropologist specialized in dance. She received her doctorate in Ethnomusicology from Queen's University, Northern Ireland. As dance researcher she collaborated with the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation (1974-1996) and since 1995 with The Friends of Music creating a database for cultural data for Thrace--Eastern Macedonia. She has taught Ethnomusicology and Dance Anthropology in the department of Social Anthropology at the Aegean University (1996-2002) and currently teaches in the Department of Music Studies at the University of Athens. Her research interests include movement systems, gender, cultural associations, and the political dimension of dance. She edited the special bi-lingual volume of Ethnographica, "Dance in Greece", 1992.

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Richard T. Neer is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. A former David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, and a Getty Post-doctoral Research Fellow, he is currently at the American Academy in Rome on a Rome Prize Fellowship. He is the author of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum, fascicule 7 (1998); Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, circa 530-460 B.C.E. (2002); and articles on Greek painting and sculpture, French classicism, and aesthetics. He is Associate Editor of Classical Philology, and Co-Editor of Critical Inquiry.

Barbara Sparti is a dance historian specialized in 15th-17th century Italian dance who has performed and choreographed period works for theatre and opera. She was Visiting Professor at University of California at Los Angeles, and guest lecturer-choreographer in Israel, UCSanta Cruz, and Princeton (in residence in April 2002). Besides her edition-translation of Guglielmo Ebreo's 1463 dance treatise (Oxford), and the imminent release of her Introduction to the facsimile edition of a newly discovered 1614 dance treatise (Olms), she publishes on questions regarding style and aesthetics, dance music, improvisation, Jewish dancing-masters, and the moresca.

Placida Staro has a doctorate in Ethnomusicology and a Diploma in Laban Kinetography Notation. She has taught and lectured on Folk Traditions, Folk Dancing, Ethnomusicology and Gestural Anthropology at universities, theatre schools, music institutes in Italy, Europe and USA. She is involved in ethnographic, musical and choreutical researches concerning minorities and cultural groups in urban and rural regions of Italy. Her twenty-year community research about individual creative transformation of the musical heritage in the Appennine village where she lives resulted in the book and CD, Il canto delle donne antiche (LIM, 2001). Besides numerous articles on music and dance in specialized journals, her most recent volumes deal with folk instruments. She plays traditional violin for dances.

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Alessandra Uguccioni has a degree in Art History from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" with a thesis on "Dance in Fifteenth-Century Images". Her doctorate was in modern and contemporary art. She has collaborated with the National Preservations Offices of Rome, with the Galleria of Palazzo Spada and with Galleria Borghese. In 1984 she was research assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and at the Sarah Blaffer Foundation (Houston). She is chief editor for the Art section for the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. She has written various articles on art history topics, especially related to 15th- and 16th-century Italian art.

Judy Van Zile is Professor of Dance at the University of Hawaii. A frequent guest lecturer and presenter at international conferences, her recent book, Perspectives on Korean Dance, received a 2003 Outstanding Publication award from the Congress on Research in Dance. Her specialization in Korean dance, to which she brings her expertise in movement analysis, includes such areas as Korea's National Treasure system, Korean dance in the diaspora, and iconography of Korean dance.

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Chairs

Marianne Bröcker is professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Bamberg. Her special interests are musical instruments (including iconography), movement and dance, and Chinese theatre, music and dance.

Christina Huemer has been Drue Heinz Librarian at the American Academy since 1992. She has performed with the gamelan Puspa Sari of the Indonesian Embassy in Rome.

Livio Pestilli is Director of the Rome campus of Trinity College. He is an art historian specialized in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. Much of his work focuses on iconography.

Dana Prescott is a painter and writer who has been living and working in Rome for most of the past 20 years. She is presently the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director of the American Academy in Rome.

Ingrid D. Rowland, a cultural historian, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the American Academy in Rome.

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