
Baroque Dreaming Into Contemporary Opera
- Music
Mysticism, Feminism, and the Power of Nature
View details about the event: Baroque Dreaming Into Contemporary OperaDocumentary Screening and Panel Discussion
Overview
Part of the series
Race, Migration, Italy
Screening
The Black Italian Renaissance: African Presence in Art
(Documentary, Italy, 2022, 90 min.)
In ENGLISH and ITALIAN with English subtitles
Directed by
Cristian Di Mattia
Written by
Francesca Priori
Followed by a panel discussion with:
Angelica Pesarini, University of Toronto
Jennifer L. Morgan, NYU
Deborah Willis, NYU
In ENGLISH
Blackness is not always immediately associated with Italian Renaissance history, but African people and people of African descent were integral parts of the Italian Renaissance. Their presence is attested to in Renaissance sculpture, painting, and archival records—hidden in plain sight. The documentary The Black Italian Renaissance: African Presence in Art (2022), written by journalist and screenwriter Francesca Priori and directed by filmmaker Cristian Di Mattia, seeks to uncover information about Black life in Renaissance Italy, asking: who were the African and Afro-descendant people depicted in Renaissance art? Where did they come from, and what were their experiences in Italy?
Trailer
About the speakers
Angelica Pesarini is an Assistant Professor in Race and Cultural Studies/Race and Diaspora and Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work seeks to expand the field of Black Italia focusing on dynamics of race, gender, identity, and citizenship. Angelica is currently writing a book on the lived experience of Black “mixed race” Italian women during the (post)colonial fascist period in East Africa, and the use of oral sources as counter-narratives. As a scholar-activist, she is engaged in the Italian anti-racist movement.
Jennifer L. Morgan is The Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of History in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. She is the author of the prize-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021) and of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). She is the recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Award and is currently the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Photographer and curator, Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch, New York University. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among other books.
Race, Migration, Italy is a series of events (book discussions, theatrical performances, film screenings, lectures) sponsored by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in collaboration with NYU’s Department of Italian Studies. It aims to promote conversations on the intersections of race and migration in Italy and in Italian diasporic communities. moment. Conceived in connection with courses taught in the Department of Italian Studies, Race, Migration, Italy revisits the format launched by Casa Italiana’s Virtual Salons: Discourses on Black Italia, held virtually during the pandemic, by bringing together artists and scholars in order to address questions about race and racialization across Italian history and multifaceted geography.