NICOLA LUCCHI

Director of Research and Education at Magazzino Italian Art

Nicola Lucchi is Director of Research and Education at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, NY, where he oversees the Library, the Fellowship Program, and the museum’s publications, as well as the activities of its Education Center. Before joining Magazzino, he served as Executive Director of the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York, managing the Center’s exhibitions, cultural programs, and its Research Fellowship for graduate and postgraduate scholars. Earlier in his career, Lucchi taught Italian language, literature, and culture at the university level, first as Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson College and later as Substitute Lecturer and Adjunct Assistant Professor at CUNY’s Queens College. His research has appeared in scholarly journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogs, with a focus on Italian Futurism, the dialogue between poetry and the visual arts, and the work of Bruno Munari. Besides his scholarship, he has curated exhibitions on Futurism, political propaganda, avant-garde advertising posters, interwar architecture, and Piero Manzoni. Lucchi received his PhD in Italian Studies from New York University in 2016.

MAURIZIO SCUDIERO

Art Curator and Historian

Scudiero is the leading expert on Futurism. He studied aesthetics with Dino Formaggio and modern art history with Mario De Micheli, earning a degree in architecture. In the 1980s, he contributed to the reevaluation of the work of Futurist painter Fortunato Depero, following the line of research initiated by Bruno Passamani. He is the leading scholar not only of Depero but also of Iras Baldessari. He has curated over one hundred exhibitions in Italy and abroad on Futurism and related themes, as well as on other specific areas of interest such as avant-garde graphic design, advertising posters, American comics, and Aeropainting. He is also an expert in "Avant-Garde Literature," particularly that of Eastern Europe.

He has been a member of the scientific committee of the Wolfsonian FIU in Miami, the American counterpart of the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, and a consultant on Futurism at Yale University. With the exhibition at the National Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, he brought works by major Futurist painters—Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carrà—to Taiwan for the first time.

For years, he wrote for the cultural pages of Il Giornale and Arte by Mondadori. Between exhibition catalogs and monographic books, he has over 200 publications to his credit.

VESELA SRETENOVIĆ

Scholar and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Vesela Sretenović has been a long-time scholar and curator of modern and contemporary art with special interest in cross-disciplinary art practices. Most recently (2009-2023), she served as Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives and Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. During her tenure, she initiated and oversaw a series of ongoing art projects called Intersections, inviting contemporary artists—national and international, emerging and established—to engage with the museum permanent collection and architecture and create new work(s). The participating artists included, A Balasubramaniam, Sanford Biggers, Annabel Daou, Los Carpinteros, Jae Ko, Linling Lu, Jennifer Wen Ma, Linn Meyers, Marta Perez, Bettina Pouttschi, Ranjani Shettar, and Alyson Shotz, among many others. In addition, Sretenović had organized monographic exhibitions of prominent artists including Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Antony Gormley, and the first museum retrospective of at that time unknown Cuban artist Zilia Sanchez. In addition to her curatorial work, she oversaw the Phillips academic partnership initiatives with the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to The Phillips, Sretenović worked at Brown University, the University at Buffalo SUNY, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
After departing from the Phillips, she funded Nonalignedart LLC, a platform that fosters open conversations and unbiased discussion of modern and contemporary art and culture and organizes projects that address critical issues of our time. Here most recent curatorial projects included: Around the Table at the Georgetown University Art Galleries (2024), an exhibition that explored socio-political signification of food and celebrated shared experiences and cultural diversity; #Serbia in Real Life at the Katzen Art Center, American University (2024-25); and Anonymous Was a Women: The First 25 Years at the Grey Art Museum, New York University (2025). She is now preparing another exhibition related to Anonymous Was a Women Award for The Kreeger Museum focusing on four artists from DMV area: Jae Ko, Linn Meyers, Renée Stout, and Joyce J. Scott.
Sretenović holds a BA in Art History from University of Belgrade, Former Yugoslavia, an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Humanities from Syracuse University.