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Elena Nustrini

short vita

Elena Nustrini, M.A., is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and part of the DFG-funded research project “De-/Colonial Modernities: Representing ‘Peripheries’ at World’s Fairs”.

Her academic research fields are the history of collections and exhibitions, art and colonial knowledge and practices, as well as botanical prints and drawings of the 17th to 19th centuries. 

In her Ph.D. she investigates the role of visual arts, particularly of Realism, in the process of the construction of ‘national’ identities in Argentina and Italy in the late 19th century. She examines the role of arts in the interplay between the establishment of a 'national art'  and the transregional artistic exchange in the context of national and international exhibitions.

 

Nustrini studied art history, literature, philology, and linguistics at the Free University of Berlin, the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy), and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). 

In her Master's thesis (2022), she focused on the process of artistic appropriation of the colony of Dutch Brazil (1637-1644). She investigated how colonial botanical drawings were assimilated into the art of Dutch still life and how epistemological observations on the so-called ‘New World’ were used by the colonizers to legitimize European superiority by means of a ‘naturalization’ of economic exploitation processes.

During her studies, she worked at the Italienzentrum and at the Institute of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, in several auction houses, as a translator and was awarded a scholarship from the Deutschlandstipendium and the German National Academic Foundation.