Kristen Marchetti

Kristen specializes in European art of the late Middle Ages. She is especially interested in monastic art produced by and for women in late medieval Europe. Before beginning her doctoral studies at Columbia in 2025, she received an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her M.A. thesis, "The Annunciation as a Unicorn Hunt: Unicorn Imagery in Late Medieval Female Devotion," examined the spiritual and gendered significance of unicorn imagery for nuns in German-speaking regions of the late Middle Ages. 

Kristen received a B.A. with honors from Brown University in 2022, graduating with concentrations in Visual Art and the History of Art and Architecture. She wrote her honors thesis on the material culture and architecture of a Carthusian monastery and produced an accompanying SketchUp model of a fifteenth-century monk's cell. Her thesis was the recipient of the Best Thesis Prize in Brown's Department of the History of Art and Architecture. 

Kristen has held administrative, curatorial, and teaching internships at David Tunick, Inc., the Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. From 2022 to 2023, Kristen was a Cole Fellow at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, where she served as an assistant curator in the exhibition Women Reframe American Landscape. She contributed to three publications during her fellowship, including publishing an article on the nineteenth-century American artist Sarah Cole.