Features

Evan Jewell (2023 Fellow) has been selected to be the new director of the Classical Summer School. 

Miranda E. Mote, our 2024 Fellow in landscape architecture, is bringing the outdoors in while welcoming some unlikely visitors to her studio: scores of children ages three to fifteen for specially designed classes that combine art, botany, and plant stories. 

At the center of the Roman Forum, often ignored by the tourists visiting the area, lies an archaeological treasure trove that holds secrets from the oldest days of Rome: the Regia. This remarkable site served as the subject of a major seminar held at the Curia Julia on Thursday.

The Academy’s Institutional Archive has published three new oral histories from the sculptor Gilbert Franklin, the artist Robert B. Green, and the classicists Lawrence Richardson Jr. and Emeline Hill Richardson. 

The two-faced deity Janus is associated with thresholds, beginnings, and transitions—an apt mascot for AAR, which represents a symbolic threshold between America and Europe, and between past and future.

Malcolm Bell III (1970 Fellow, 1989 Resident), a widely admired archaeologist, a longtime field director of excavations at Morgantina in Sicily, and an international advocate for the protection of cultural heritage, has died.

We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 68 of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, AAR’s annual peer-reviewed journal.

As we prepare to usher in a new year, AAR revisits the 2023 calendar year and the highlights of our Fellows’ work.

AAR spoke with the art historian Diane Cole Ahl (2013 Resident), author of the recently published Painting in Fifteenth-Century Italy: “This Splendid and Noble Art” from Yale University Press.

Take a glimpse into our annual Winter Open Studios event.

On December 5, the eighth edition of the Bridge Book Award took place with an award ceremony at Centro Studi Americani in Rome. 

Nearly a century ago, AAR Director Gorham Stevens rushed to avert a duel between an Italian officer and a Fellow.

In remembrance of 1958 Rome Prize Fellow Ann Freeman, the Academy’s Institutional Archive is delighted to share her “A Christmas Poem” from 1956.

Andy Akiho (2015 Fellow), a musical composer and performer based in Portland, Oregon, has been nominated for three Grammy Awards this year.

Rome Work is the title of 2023 Fellow Todd Gray’s exhibition at the gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles. As the title indicates, the artist made the pieces at the Academy during his Rome Prize Fellowship, from February to July 2023.

On Italian Arbor Day, AAR plants a tree in what will become a new annual tradition.

Marla Stone was inducted into the Accademia dei Lincei on November 10.

Varying Shades of Brown is a project featuring major installations and programs across the entire campus of Brown University by the acclaimed artist Carrie Mae Weems (2006 Fellow and AAR Trustee).

The Academy’s Rome Sustainable Food Project hosted the opening reception for the CLIMAVORE Assembly, a conference held in Rome that explores new cultural and artistic tactics for ecologically driven action and policymaking.

Valentina Follo has joined AAR’s staff on a permanent, part-time basis, as Curator of the Norton-Van Buren Archaeological Study Collection and Program Manager of the Classical Summer School, and Johanne Affricot has joined AAR as Curator-at-Large.