Faculty

Profile

Dr. Lorraine Karafel is an art historian and a writer.  She holds a PhD in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Dr. Karafel's research focuses on art and design in the 15th to 17th centuries and considers issues of design process, workshop practices, and the relationships between designer, maker, and patron. Her work has received numerous grants and awards. In 2007 Dr. Karafel was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome and from 2007 to 2009 she held a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her international publications include articles and reviews in Renaissance Quarterly, Journal of Design History, caa.reviews, Art Sacré, Filo Forme, ARTnews, and The Magazine Antiques. She contributed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's award-winning 2002 exhibition catalogue, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence and to the Met's 2014 exhibition catalogue, Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry. Dr. Karafel's book, Raphael's Tapestries: The Grotesques of Leo X,  was published in 2016 by Yale University Press.  Her most recent publication, Tapestries from the Burrell Collection (London: IB Tauris/Philip Wilson, 2017), co-authored with Elizabeth Cleland, was named by the London Evening Standard one of the best art books of 2017. Dr. Karafel was a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and a researcher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In addition to teaching at New York University and Rutgers University, she has lectured for leading international institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.