on sabbatical academic year 2024–25

Francesca Liuni is an architect, exhibition designer, curator and assistant professor at RISD. Liuni holds a Master’s degree in architecture from the Politecnico di Bari and a Master’s of science in history, theory and criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was part of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Art and Urbanism. She is a licensed architect in Italy. In her own practice, Liuni has designed exhibitions for the Harvard Museum of History of Science, MIT Museum, MIT Compton Gallery and RISD. She also worked for the Milan-based office Simmetrico Networks, for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and for the Archeological Studies and Reconstruction of Kos, Greece.

Her teaching practice includes collaboration with Brown University’s Department of Public Humanities, Ruth J. Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice and several museums in the area working on complex memorialization of silenced historical narratives and untold stories, such as Mystic Seaport’s 2024 exhibit Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom and a recent collaboration with Silvermoon LaRose on the development of the new storage and archive center for the Tomaquag Museum. Among her most relevant publications are Sono Persone | Ata Janë Njerëz 8.8.1991: Public Mementos and the Political Agency of Absence in Juilee Decker’s Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials and a chapter for the ICOFOM Study Series 2023 titled Politicized Aesthetics: Questioning the Neutrality of Museum Architecture and Recontextualizing Exhibition Design.

Liuni is currently working on a chapter called The Bias of Museum Architecture: Questioning the Neoclassical and Modernist Typology of Western Museums for Gillian Hannum’s forthcoming Pedagogical Reckoning: Decolonizing, De-gendering, Deconstructing the Western Art Historical Canon. In spring 2024 she co-curated with Qais Assali a fundraising exhibition and lecture series centered on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices called Busy Doing My Taxes: Archiving Unseen Genocide through a Timeline of Occupation. She is currently working on an exhibition opening at MIT in 2024 featuring her digital reconstruction drawings of some of the lost historical heritage of Syria previously published in Nasser Rabbat’s The Architecture of the Dead Cities: Toward a New Interpretation of the History of Syria, curator of the current project. The exhibit opens in fall 2024. She is also launching her magazine MOSTRA: Exhibition as a Social Act in fall/winter 2024.