Leslie Cozzi

Dr. Leslie Cozzi (she/her), FAAR’18, is the Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She co-curated the critically acclaimed survey A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone, and Baltimore, and is organizing solo exhibitions of the works of Darrel Ellis and Omar Ba that will open at the BMA in the fall of 2022.

She has previously curated exhibitions on the work of William Cordova, SHAN Wallace, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Zackary Drucker, Ana Mendieta, and Valerie Maynard. Prior to her arrival at the BMA, Dr. Cozzi was the 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Winner in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome, where she conducted research on the intersections between feminism, race, and text in post-war and contemporary Italian art. Previously, she served as the Curatorial Associate at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. In that capacity, she was responsible for research and daily management of various collections the Museum oversees, including the Armand Hammer Permanent Collection, the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, and the Grunwald Center’s extensive collection of works on paper. She helped organize several exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, including William E. Jones: Imitation of Christ; Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible; Tea and Morphine: Women in Paris, 1880-1914; Robert Heinecken: Object Matter; Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now; The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris; and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space. 

Dr. Cozzi received her BA in 2003 from Yale University, where she was awarded Distinction in the History of Art and the A. Conger Goodyear Senior Essay Prize. She received her PhD in 2012 from the University of Virginia. She received a 2010-2011 Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Italy for her dissertation, “Protagonismo e non: Mirella Bentivoglio, Carla Accardi, Carla Lonzi, and the Art of Italian Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s,” which was awarded the Zora Neale Hurston essay prize by the University of Virginia’s Women and Gender Studies program. Dr. Cozzi has co-edited and contributed to several exhibition catalogs, including A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone, and Baltimore; Valerie Maynard: Lost and Found; Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space; the Menil Collection’s publication of Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now; and the Pomona College Museum of Art’s exhibition catalog for Pages: Mirella Bentivoglio, Selected Works, 1966-2012. She has also contributed to scholarly journals, anthologies, and artforum.com.