Sheila Barker

Formerly the Executive Director of the Friends of MAP and Director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists, Sheila Barker arrived at MAP in 2005 to develop its database as a Samuel H. Kress Curatorial Fellow. In 2010, she founded MAP’s first research program: the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists, which received an award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women in 2014. Her publications include the 2020 exhibition catalog The Immensity of the Universe in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni as well as three edited volumes: Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light, Women Artists in Early Modern Italy, and Artiste nel chiostro (co-edited with Luciano Cinelli). Her articles have appeared in the Burlington Magazine, the Art Bulletin, the Court Historian, Early Modern Women, the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Memorie Domenicane, and Roma Moderna e Contemporanea. In 2022 she published Artemisia Gentileschi for Lund Humphries’s “Illuminating Women Artists” series, co-published by Getty Publishers. Currently her work with MAP is focused on the “Digital Bronzini“, a project to create a born-digital edition of Cristofano Bronzini’s Della Dignità e la Nobiltà delle Donne. The latter is a 36-tome-manuscript composed c. 1620 on the achievements of women across the ages and throughout the world.