Sanja Savić

Sanja Savić is a first-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Raised in Belgrade, Serbia, Sanja studies medieval material that reflects interfaith dialogues between Christian and Islamic material and visual cultures. Her research explores the hybridity of the architectural, decorative, and ritualistic events that arise from the fluidity of cultural zones, with particular interest in the vectors connecting Byzantine and Islamic artistic vocabularies between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Sanja’s topics of interest include the questions of iconicity, corporeality, and empathy as constitutive elements in the art of worship.

Before coming to Columbia, Sanja earned a B.A. with distinction from Stanford University, where she double-majored in Psychology and Slavic Studies, after which she received an M.A. from Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her M.A. thesis explored how the narthex of the Byzantine church Hosios Loukas utilizes mosaic representations to consolidate a growing devotional capacity of the body.