Francesca Albrezzi

Education:

Ph.D., Culture and Performance
University of California, Los Angeles
2015-2019

M.A., Culture and Performance
University of California, Los Angeles
2012-2015

B.A., Art History / Minor: American Studies (self-designed)
Smith College, Northampton, MA
2005-2009

Bio:

Francesca Albrezzi, PhD, works at the intersection of humanities research and technology. As a digital research consultant at the Office of Advanced Research Computing, she works on the Research Technology Group's GIS, Visualization, XR & Modeling team, assisting faculty with their digital research needs, from ideation to execution and publication. 

In her past, she's been affiliated with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.), the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (Paris, France), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, California). She completed her doctoral degree in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate through UCLA's Digital Humanities Program.  Her dissertation "Virtual Actualities: Technology, Museums, and Immersion" (2019) interrogates modes of publishing, display, and information capture in museums and archives that illustrate a break from “traditional” models, and argues that digital modalities provide a distinctly different paradigm for epistemologies of art and culture that offer greater contextualized understandings.

More broadly, Francesca's research explores spectrums of immersive experience within GLAM organizations as offered by technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360 photo and video capture. She also has significant experience developing digital tools, such as The Getty Scholars’ Workspace™ for conducting collaborative arts research and preservation. She was a HASTAC Scholar, has worked and taught within the field of Digital Humanities, Art History, and Cultural Studies for over a decade, and helped to produce an online digital art history textbook. At UCLA, she lectures regularly for the Digital Humanities program and occasionally for the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department. She is affiliated with the College Art Association’s educational committee, Art History Teaching Resources, and the Digital Art History Journal, where she serves as the director of the virtual gallery.