Dr. Andrea Achi will discuss important aspects of the exhibition, “Africa and Byzantium,” which she curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and which is currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art). Drawing on major international loans and the host museum’s own collection, the exhibition sheds light on the vast Byzantine Empire (which spanned parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia), while also examining the deep connections within that world. The exhibition is the result of years of work by Dr. Achi and her interdisciplinary team of over forty experts on art, religion, literature, history, and archaeology. In highlighting artworks from the multicultural communities of northern and eastern Africa, it addresses how diverse communities connected to Byzantium flourished in African empires and kingdoms for over a thousand years. It broadens public understanding of the Byzantine world, and examines the critical role of early African Christian civilizations.

Andrea Achi is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Associate Curator of Byzantine Art in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and has experience in the museum world and as an archaeologist. In September 2023, she was named by Apollo Magazine as one of their “Forty under Forty” in the art world.

Open to the public. Funded by the Lectures & Concerts Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, the Art History Department, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the departments of Africana Studies, MENA, and Religion. FMI contact Professor Stephen Perkinson, Art History.