#gerstel

Actress and model Virginia Lee wearing a Gerstel coat, Reboux hat, and Chanel scarf, in a 1929 Moderne Welt.

Sharon Gerstel is Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the Department of Art History at UCLA. She is also the Acting Director of the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture (UCLA SNF), and former Associate Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Professor Gerstel’s work focuses on the intersection of ritual and art in Byzantium and the Latin East. Her books include Beholding the Sacred Mysteries (1999) and Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology and Ethnography (2015), which was awarded the 2016 Runciman Prize, the inaugural book prize by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), and the Maria Theocharis Prize from the Christian Archaeological Society in Greece. Gerstel has also edited several books such as Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese (2012); and Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (2016).

Gerstel has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a J. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012). As an archaeologist, she has worked at numerous excavations in Greece, both as a field director and as a ceramics specialist. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Hesperia, Gesta, Viator, and Zograf and of the series Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middle Ages. Her current research focuses on the intersection of music, architecture, and monumental decoration.