Biography
Aleksandra Carapella is a museum curator, certified art conservator, PhD Fellow at University of Pittsburgh, and currently a Fulbright US Scholar. Her specialization is modern architectural history of Central Europe, particularly architectural history of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. Her research focus is on intellectual questions of identity, mobility and exchange, tensions between modernism and historicism, and national essentialism.
In addition to the Masters of Art in History of Art and Architecture from University of Pittsburgh, Aleksandra holds a Masters in Public Management (MPM) from Carnegie Mellon University, Masters in Art Conservation from the University of Ljubljana, and a BA in Painting Conservation from the Central Institute for Restoration (Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro- ISCR, formerly ICR) in Rome, with a subspecialty obtained in Stone Conservation.
As a museum curator, Aleksandra worked at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, as a conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, the Restoration Center-ZVKDS in Ljubljana, and the Central Institute for Restoration in Rome. She trained and performed treatments on traditional, modern, and contemporary paintings, including frescoes, conservation of the fountains of the Villa D’Este (La Rometta), and the reproduction of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, now standing in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. In addition, she specialized in diagnostic photography, such as UV and IR reflectography, management of collection databases and emergency preparedness programs for cultural institutions (including those with mixed media collections), as well as the production of museum collection storage designs.