Ioli Kalavrezou

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ioli Kalavrezou is a leading scholar of Byzantine art and the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art at Harvard University. Her research focuses on early Christian and Byzantine art. Before Harvard, she taught at UCLA and at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In 2002 she curated an exhibition at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum titled "Byzantine Women and their World." Unlike earlier shows that spotlighted the high art of courts and churches, this exhibit explored the daily lives of ordinary Byzantine women, challenging the idea that they were powerless. It grew out of a graduate seminar and included 186 objects spanning the Byzantine empire from the 4th to the 16th centuries, across regions such as Italy, North Africa, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land. The accompanying catalog presents most of the objects in color and includes essays, many by students, serving both as a traditional art catalog and as a resource on the history of Byzantine women.