Author Biography
Rae Di Cicco is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in the modern art, design, and cultural history of Central Europe, with a focus on issues of identity and politics faced in the region during the transition from imperial to national organization after World War I. She received her BA in Art History from the University of Washington in 2010, and an MA in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. She has been awarded a Botstiber Fellowship in Austrian-American Studies, a travel fellowship from the Center for Italian Modern Art, a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant for intensive German language acquisition at the Geothe Institute in Freiburg, Germany, and a K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship for diversity in graduate education at the University of Pittsburgh.
Di Cicco’s master’s thesis explores the incorporation of signifiers of national artistic styles into Kineticist artist Erika Giovanna Klien’s artistic production as a kind of cosmopolitan imagination, visualizing – literally making visual – hybrid and shifting identity and multiple belonging. Her dissertation, titled “The Kosmos, the Body, and the Other: The Cosmopolitan Imagination of Erika Giovanna Klien,” will trace Klien’s career from her beginnings as a member of the Vienna-based modernist movement Kinetismus to her immigration to the United States and subsequent work with indigenous groups of the American Southwest.
