Francesca Liuni

Francesca Liuni is an Architect, Exhibition Designer, Curator, and Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Department of Interior Architecture. Liuni holds a Master's Degree in Architecture from the Politecnico di Bari and a Master's of Science in History, Theory and Criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was part of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Art, and Urbanism. She is a licensed architect in Italy. With her own practice Liuni designed exhibitions for the Harvard Museum of History of Science, MIT Museum, MIT Compton Gallery, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She also worked for the Milan-based office Simmetrico Networks, for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and for the Archeological Studies and Reconstruction of Kos, Greece.

Her teaching practice includes collaboration with Brown University’s Department of Public Humanities, Ruth J. Simmons center for Slavery and Justice, and several museums in the area working on complex memorialization of silenced historical narratives and untold stories, such as Mystic Seaport’s  2024 exhibit Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom or recent collaboration with Silvermoon LaRose on the development of the new Museum storage and Archive of the Tomaquag Museum and the Brown UNiversity Ruth Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice. Among her most relevant publications Sono Persone | Ata Janë Njerëz 8.8.1991: Public Mementos and the Political Agency of Absence in Juilee Decker's Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials and a chapter for the ICOFOM Study Series 2023 titled Politicized Aesthetics. Questioning the Neutrality of Museum Architecture and Recontextualizing Exhibition Design. 

Liuni is currently working on the upcoming chapter The Bias of Museum Architecture. Questioning the Neoclassical and Modernist Typology of Western Museums in Gillian Hannum’s Pedagogical Reckoning. Decolonizing, De-gendering, Deconstructing the Western Art Historical Canon. Among her latest works Out of Antiquity, an MIT exhibition featuring Liuni's digital reconstruction drawings of some of the lost historical heritage of Syria previously published in Nasser Rabbat’s The Architecture of the Dead Cities, who co-curated the current exhibition. Liuni is also launching her magazine MOSTRA. Exhibition as a Social Act in Spring 2025.