In celebration of Black History Month 2025, There’s Always More, the American Academy in Rome hosts a screening of The Black Italian Renaissance: African Presence in Art (2022), an award-winning documentary written by journalist and screenwriter Francesca Priori and directed by filmmaker Cristian Di Mattia. After the screening, Priori and Di Mattia, alongside Angelica Pesarini, Assistant Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, and Justin Randolph Thompson, artist and Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence and The Recovery Plan, will be in conversation with AAR’s Curator-at-Large Johanne Affricot.

In the halls of the Uffizi Gallery, in the great Venetian Palaces, or in the naves of the most important churches in Rome, Renaissance paintings conceal countless faces hidden in plain sight: those of African and afro-descendant figures. Who were they? Where did they come from? Why were they portrayed, and why did they remain unobserved? This documentary uncovers the African presence in European society through the paintings of renowned Renaissance artists and archival documents dissected by an international team of art historians, scholars, and artists. The film highlights the identities and roles of African figures in Italy, while also examining the evolution of racial concepts from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

Biographies

Cristian Di Mattia is a director and filmmaker who graduated from the New York Film Academy. Since then, he has written and directed music videos, commercials, and short films that have been featured in various international film festivals. Over the years, he has produced documentaries for major platforms and television networks. For Rai Cinema, he directed a series of docu-films: Il Condannato – Aldo Moro (2018), 1989 – Cronache dal Muro (2019), La Dannazione della Sinistra: Cronache di una Scissione (2020). He has also directed several television programs and documentaries for Sky, Mediaset, Discovery, and Rai.

Angelica Pesarini is Assistant Professor of Race and Cultural Studies/Race and Diaspora and Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work seeks to expand the field of Black Italia focusing on dynamics of race, gender, identity, and citizenship. She is among the co-founders of The Black Mediterranean Collective, which published The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She contributed a short story to Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (Future. Tomorrow Narrated by Today’s Voices, 2019), an anthology by 11 Italian women of African descent. She co-translated Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Blues, Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis into Italian. Pesarini is currently writing a book on the lived experience of Black “mixed race” Italian women during the (post)colonial fascist period in East Africa.

Francesca Priori is an Italian independent journalist, showrunner, screenwriter, and director of documentary films, cultural and entertainment series, and television programs. Since 1990, she has explored a wide range of themes, including literature, art, design, music, social issues, science, and the environment. Her empathetic yet disenchanted view of the world, honed through her work with Mediaset, Tele+, and Sky TV, combined with her love for in-depth research, has enabled her to uncover, document, and narrate unique and original stories. She has narrated the lives of numerous influential figures–writers, artists, musicians, directors, actors, scientists, historians, and thinkers–across ancient, modern or contemporary eras, all of whom have helped shape contemporary culture. Priori is the creator, screenwriter and showrunner of several acclaimed and award-winning international projects, including The Black Italian Renaissance (2022), a documentary exploring the untold story of African figures who lived during the Italian Renaissance and often appeared in famous paintings, yet have been largely overlooked by the dominant culture; Botticelli, Florence and the Medici (2022), a docu-film that explores the intersection of Botticelli’s work with the de’ Medici family and the cultural flourishing of Renaissance Florence; and of the TV series Hidden Italy (2017-2022) which highlights Italy’s lesser-known yet important places and monuments, told through images and the insights of historians, academics, and local experts.

Justin Randolph Thompson is an artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY. Based in Italy and the US since 1999, Thompson is Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, a multi-faceted exploration of Black histories and cultures in the context of Italy founded in 2016. Having realized, coordinated, curated, facilitated, and promoted over 300 events and with 8 ongoing research platforms, the initiative has been reframed as a Black cultural center called The Recovery Plan. Thompson is a recipient of a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Italian Council Research Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park, amongst others. His work and performances have been exhibited widely in institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and The American Academy in Rome, and are part of numerous collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museo MADRE. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism, and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing, and gestures of collectivity.