Art historian, curator, and educator specialized in modern and contemporary art, Dr. Sarah Linford works closely with emerging and established artists, galleries and museums on both sides of the Atlantic. She has curated widely, working at and with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the musée d'Orsay, the Petit Palais, among others. Educated primarily in France and the United States, she attended the École normale supérieure-Ulm; the University of Paris 7; her French D.E.A. won first international student prize at Trinity College, Dublin; her French doctorate garnered the prestigious Musée d'Orsay prize for best dissertation on the period 1848-1914. In the United States, her degrees in art history and comparative literature - first prize at the University of Berkeley - were followed by Masters and Ph.D. degrees in modern and contemporary art from Princeton University.
In addition to curating and publishing, Professor Linford has taught and advised internationally, including at the post-graduate honor’s program of the universities of Munich and Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the École normale supérieure-Cachan, the Universities of California, the University of Quebec at Montréal, the Universities of Paris-Ouest (Nanterre) and of Paris-Est (MLV), the École du Louvre, and the Cooper-Hewitt-Smithsonian. After five years at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, teaching and establishing relations with the city’s historic foreign academies and Rome’s major cultural institutions, while actively curating and publishing, and with continued ties to France and the United States - most recently for the UCLA/Getty program in the Digital Humanities and as guest professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts - she joined the faculty of John Cabot University’s Department of Art History and Studio Art.
Her most recent papers were given at “Les nomenclatures stylistiques à l’épreuve de l’objet” (Swiss Institute Rome/Biblioteca Hertziana Rome/Villa Medici Rome, 2019); at “The Modern Ages in the Modern World” (John Cabot University and the École française de Rome, 2019). Her most recent exhibitions include the commemorative exhibition of the French Academy’s 350th anniversary held at the Academy of Fine Arts Rome, a pendant to those of Villa Medici and the Academy of Saint Luke (2016); High Noon, the first exhibition of the six major foreign academies in Rome (with A. Drake and A. Saroli, 2017); an exhibition on the renewed practice of life drawing, at the Museo Canonica in Rome (2017); an international exhibition of contemporary art relating to H. Damisch and the question of motif, Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium (2018); the commemorative exhibition of the Church of Saint-Louis-des-français’ 500th anniversary (2018); New Directions in Printmaking (with D. Kovach, 2018) and, in Mantua, of contemporary artist Lorenzo Modica (2018). In addition to scholarly articles, her recently published volumes include Le Génie dans l’art. Anthologie critique des écrits esthétiques et critiques de Gabriel Séailles (ed. with M. Passini, 2011); Accademia. Accademie. Ricerca, trasmissione e creazione artistica nei s. XIX-XX (ed. and contrib., with M. Bussagli and P. Roccasecca, 2016); Il Disegno dal vero come pratica storica e sapere contemporaneo (2016); La Mémoire des objets. Saint-Louis-des-Français 1518-2018 (ed. and contrib., with Mgr F. Bousquet, 2018); B e C. Del Linguaggio privato (ed. and contrib., 2018). Imminent volumes include a special issue of InSitu, the French ministry’s periodical on cultural heritage, on the art collections of French and Italian academies (ed. and contrib., with M. Joly-Parvex and H. Palouzié); Une Tradition révolutionnaire : l’art figuratif de Rome à Paris entre deux guerres (ed. and contrib., with J. Delaplanche, D. Jarrassé and L. Iamurri); the trilingual conference proceedings of the 350th anniversary symposium of the Villa Medici (ed. and contrib., with J. Delaplanche) and Forcefields: Rome and Contemporary Printmaking (ed. and contrib., with D. Kovach).
