Licia Buttà

Licia Buttà is a Full Professor of Medieval Art History at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona; she holds a PhD in Medieval Art History from the University of Barcelona; a specialization in Archaeology and Art History from the University of Siena; and a degree in Classical Studies from the University of Palermo.

She has carried out postdoctoral stays at the Warburg Institute in London (Postdoctoral Fellowship BE-DGR [2009 BE-1 00275] and José Castillejo Fellowship [CAS14/00441]) in 2010 and 2015, and more recently in 2024. She has also been Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2021 ("Salvador de Madariaga" Programme 2019, PRX19/00603) and at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University in 2025. She has taught at the universities of Barcelona, Copenhagen, Trento and Agadir, among others.
She is the author of Immaginare il potere. Il soffitto dipinto della Sala Magna di Palazzo Chiaromonte Steri e la cultura letteraria e artistica a Palermo nel Trecento (2022), co-funded by the ICMA-Kress Foundation Grant for Research and Publication and winner of the AFCEMS Book Prize as Best Book on Medieval Art 2023 - Center for Early Medieval Studies (Brno). She is co-author of El retaule-tabernacle de Santa Maria de l'Estrella de la Catedral de Tortosa. Memoria Artium 31, 2023, El teatre del cos. Dansa, espectacle i rituals a la Corona d'Aragó / Il teatro del corpo. Danza, spettacolo e rituali nella Corona d'Aragona (2022), and editor of Narrazione, exempla, retorica. Studi sull'iconografia dei soffitti dipinti nel Medioevo Mediterraneo (Palermo, 2013), as well as editor of several special issues in academic journals.

Her articles have been published in indexed journals such as Storia dell'arte, Ricerche di Storia dell'arte, Paragone, Goya, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, Perspective: Actualité en Histoire de l'Art, among others. Since 2010 she has been the Coordinator of the URV research group ICONODANZA and has been Principal Investigator of the following research projects: "Traces and Forms of Dance in the Long Middle Ages: Iconographic, Textual and Ethnographic Corpus in the Iberian Peninsula and Its Ibero-American Projection" (2014-2017, FFI2013-42939-P) and "Choreutic Heterotopias, Dance and Performance in the Visual and Literary Culture of the Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" (HAR2017-85625-P, 2018-2021). She is also a member of the interdisciplinary group (Consolidated Research Group SGR 2021 00970) NEXUS/LAIREM: Literature, Art and Representation in the Long Middle Ages (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), IP dr. Maria Morràs. 
She currently leads the project MUDANZA. Dancing Women. Idolatry and Rituals: Visual Culture and Cultural History of Dance during the Long Middle Ages (PID2022-140028NB-100, 2023-2026), funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Since 2022 she has been a Collaborator of the Division for Coordination, Evaluation and Scientific and Technical Monitoring of the Spanish State Research Agency (Manager of the scientific area: Culture: Philology, Literature and Art - FLA).