PhD students
Hamutal Sadan
PhD candidate in Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on art in prison, transitional art, migration, and questions of censorship and power-relations.
Mirco Vannoni
PhD student in Scienze della Cultura at the University of Palermo. His research interests focus on the semiotics of culture and art, image and representation theory.
Julia Kritsikokas
PhD student in Cultural Studies, University of Palermo. Topic of her research project's for GAP: Comparison of visual and verbal self-expression, social inclusion and spread of street art.
Valentina Grispo
Phd student in Cultural Sciences at the University of Palermo. Her interests are the interweaving between art and neuroscience. Her research project for GAP aims to investigate the bodily dimension of graffiti art.
Elizabeth Hoak-Doering
Visual artist writing a PhD in Classical Archaeology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Her project for GAP focusses on abstract markings, erasure, and existential dimensions of graffiti.
Raffaello Cardaccia
He is drafting a PhD project about anonymity in European literature during the 16th and 17th century. For the GAP Project, he proposed a research on the Catholic censorship of anonymous books in Early Modern Age.
Anna Clara Basilicò
Currently enrolled as PhD candidate at the University of Padua and the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her field of study is the social history of prison. She is also affiliated to the Venice Center for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH).
Daniele Roccaro
PhD student at the University of Palermo in the Department of Architecture. Scratching and coloring the wall means modifying that space and creating a new one made of signs full of meaning.
Belén Buil Pallás
Art historian from the University of Zaragoza.The new Inquisition in Aragon (15th-19th centuries) and its repercussions on the arts. Location, cataloguing and artistic and iconographic analysis of the spaces and elements of the Holy Office.
Mitra Kazemi
Currently completing an MA in Art History at McGill University, Montreal. Her research analyzes the graffiti at the Steri as a living archive, through the lens of carceral aesthetics.
Flavia Crisciotti
Ph.D. candidate, specializing in the history of twentieth-century architecture at the Technische Universität München. Her GAP project examines the relationship between mural painting and architecture.
Maria Foradada Pina
Art historian from the University of Zaragoza. her research is about Localization and cataloguing of medieval mural graffiti in Aragon. Contemporary works of art made by authors in prison.
Marcos Larraz Rincón
Art Historian from the University of Zaragoza. His research for GAP is about Photography and its different uses in mental institutions and other deprivation of liberty centers.
Saskia Verlaan
Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her research project for GAP focuses on carceral themes in the work of the artist Jannis Kounellis.
Gabriella Palermo
PhD Student of Science of Culture – Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo, at the Department of Cultures and Societies. Her Research Project in Geography is about the emerging concept of the ‘Black Mediterranean’.
Davide Cardinale
Astrophysicist and a PhD student at the Astronomical observatory of Palermo. Actually, he is working on a space project selected by the European Space Agency as the next medium-size mission(M4).
Gulden Deniz Tokmak
Ph.D. Student in Human Rights: Evolution, Protection, and Limits - University of Palermo Within the GAP Project, she will investigate artistic expression as resistance and suppression of inmates’ artistic expression and self-censorship as a result.
Pier Luigi Jose Mannella
Currently engaged, as a PhD student in Humanities (University of Palermo), in the creation of a Lexicon delle pratiche magico-rituali in Sicilia.
Ines Colás
She has a degree in Fine Arts and a Master's degree in Cultural Heritage Management in Zaragoza. For GAP she will study how spaces of repression became centers of culture through encounter and/or artistic action in Spain during the second half of the 20th century.
Yelena Kovalyova
Belarusian lawyer in public international law. She received her PhD from the IMT School of Advanced Studies in Lucca. For the GAP project, she will analyze emerging creative works or works dedicated to the political protest movement in Belarus in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections.
Francesca Renda
Universidad Autónoma Madrid, she is working on her thesis Las prácticas artísticas socialmente comprometidas del siglo XXI: a partir del Archivo de Arte Útil. For GAP he proposes a project on the creation of new democratic spaces through participatory art.
Verena Meier
PhD student in History at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. For the GAP-Project she focuses on a micro-historical study of graffiti in forced-institutions as a source, which highlights the inmates’ voice.
Virginia Di Bari
Ph.D. Student in Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo, she has been involved in workshop activities in prison since 2017. Her research interests include the interconnections between art and philosophy, images atlases and immersive reality. She collaborates with Studio Azzurro and the ERC project AN-ICON.
