Photo: Viktor Novikov

Angelina Lucento is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Russian and East European Studies. Trained as a social art historian, she studies the global histories of painting and photography, with a specific focus on the contributions that artists from the former USSR made to those histories. The art of the African Diaspora comprises Lucento’s second aera of expertise. She is currently working on a second project about radical Black American art in the 1960s and 70s and its relationship to Eastern European socialism. Her work has been supported by the CEU Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Getty Research Institute. She has published articles in Cahiers du Monde russe, Performance Research, The Russian Review, and caa.reviews. Lucento is completing her first book, The Socialist Surface: Painting as the Source of Soviet Media Culture, 1918-1941.