A native of Berkeley, California, Maia Wellington Gahtan received her B.A. in both History of Art and Linguistics and her Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Villa I Tatti. Formerly a curator at Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and Program Director of the M.A. in Museum Studies at Marist-LdM Florence, her scholarly interests concentrate on textual criticism, the history of collecting and museums, and more generally on the interplay between intellectual/cultural history, language, literature and the representational arts, especially of the Early Modern period.
As program director, she supervised over 30 theses on subjects ranging from ancient collecting practice to Picasso and instituted a Forum on Museums and Religion dedicated to bringing religious authorities in dialogue with museum professionals which produced four conferences and publications which she edited or co-edited: Museum; Churches, Temples, Mosques, Places of Worship or Museums?; Sacred Objects in Sacred Collections; Sacred Art and the Museum Exhibition, and Religion in Museum Education. Since then, she has written articles about religion and collections for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion and the Arts.
At the University of Rome La Sapienza, she is currently an Aggregate Professor for two Grande Progetti Ricerca (2021-2023; 2024-2026) and co-coordinator of a CIVIS/Erasmus+ course and workshop (2022-2026), both relating to her co-direction of the European language museum project, Eurotales - Museum of the Voices of Europe, and particularly its field venue, DIFFUSEUM, which embraces the fragments (called “traces’) of linguistic cultures—tangible and intangible—embedded in public monuments and material culture diffused through a borderless Europe.
She serves on the editorial boards of the Voci del Museo series at Edifir and the open- source journal, Arts, is a member of the Research Advisory Group of the Forum on Education Abroad, and belongs to numerous professional associations among which SISCA (Società Italiana della Storia della Critica d’Arte), ICOM (International Council on Museums), CAAH (Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians), and IANLS (International Association for Neo-Latin Studies). She regularly contributes to scholarly journals and edited collections and has curated exhibitions and edited a number of books beyond those of the Forum, among which Vasari’s Florence; Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum; Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World; Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art; Collecting and Empires. An Historical and Global Perspective; Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage.