Sabrina Rastelli is Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, where she has been teaching since 1999. She received her PhD from SOAS, University of London. She regularly carries out research in China, where she has also participated in archaeological work at the Yaozhou and Jun kilns. She has taught courses at Peking University (2014) and Hanoi University (2017) and in Autumn 2023 she was a fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has been consultant and coordinator for the Treccani Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Art for the China area (PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea and South-East Asia.
Her research interests include the development of Chinese ceramics, Song dynasty culture, funerary art and contemporary art. She has organised important exhibitions on ancient China: Cina. Nascita di un Impero in 2006; China at the Court of the Emperors. Unknown Masterpieces from Han Tradition to Tang Elegance (25-907) in 2008; I Due Imperi: l’Aquila e il Dragone in 2010; Vivid Transparencies. Yaozhou Wares from the Shang Shan Tang Collectionin 2022; and on a contemporary Korean artist Yeesookyung Whisper Only to You in 2020.
She has written extensively on Chinese ceramics and ancient Chinese art: she is the author of The Yaozhou kilns: A Re-evaluation (2008) and Chinese Art: from the Origins to the Tang Dynasty (2016, in Italian, first of two volumes), and she is the editor of exhibition catalogues. She is chief editor of the book series Marco Polo Studies in Global Europe-Asia Connections.
Email: rastelli@unive.it