Giuliana Bruno researches the intersections of visual art, architecture, film, and media. Her widely praised book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014) revisited the concept of materiality in contemporary art. An earlier title, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (1993), was a critical remapping of Elvira Notari, Italy’s most prolific woman filmmaker.

While in Rome, Bruno will work on her next book, Atmospheres of Projection: Art and Screen Media, which “explores the art of projection, both conceptually and artistically.” For her, projection is both historical and contemporary for humanity, and her project will “perform a cultural excavation into the notion of projection, moving across psychoanalysis, architecture, visual art, and moving image culture, where the concept and practice of projective mechanisms have developed over time.” Postwar Italian artists who found a new kind of art object in the projective screen will be one focus of the book. Bruno is especially thrilled to have the reflective time to write a book about projective atmospheres in the beautiful “atmosphere” of the Academy: “I am Italian by birth, and left Italy when I was very young, right after the laurea, on a Fulbright fellowship. It is wonderful to return and see Rome with different eyes.”