Dr. Angela Clarke has been the Museum Director and Curator at the Italian Cultural Centre Museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada since 2012. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she specialized in women, religion and decorative art of the Italian Renaissance as well as museology. Her primary research focus has been the material culture of Renaissance Italy, specifically, a social historical approach to Deruta maiolica ceramics 1500-1550, as they pertain to the lives of middle-class Umbrian women in the domestic space. However, since the completion of her dissertation she has expanded her research to include other domestic decorative arts such as textiles, mirrors, devotional items, costume, jewelry, liturgical objects and mosaics as well as gender studies. Her book: Ideal Brides: Deruta Bella Donna Plates, c. 1500-1550 (Roma: Aracne Editrice) was published in 2020. Her curatorial work focuses on fine arts and material culture working with contemporary interpreters of Italian decorative art traditions including fibre arts, mosaic, tapestry, ceramic in addition to the contemporary visual arts of painting, print making and sculpture, as well as the history of Italian opera and Italian Canadian history c. 1875-present. She also focuses on working with women and LGBTQ artists. In 2020 she curated an exhibition series on Charles Marega (1872-2022) funded by Canadian Heritage. She has curated over 55 exhibitions both at the Italian Cultural Centre and for other galleries in Vancouver. As Guest Curator she has also curated exhibitions in partnership with Italian cultural organizations including: the annual Feminarte textile exhibition Montopoli, Italy and the European Union Project Performigrations in cooperation with the Media and North American literature Department at the University of Bologna. She curated and administered the Vancouver leg of the traveling exhibition focused on the 600th anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. She also curated the Lilian Broca’s Mary Magdalene exhibition at the Carrier Gallery, Villa Charities in Toronto, Ont. Recently, she was project coordinator for an Ivan Sayers fashion exhibition Dressed for History: Why Costume Collections Matter at the Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver. Canada. She is also a proven grant writer. Since 2020 she has raised over $500,000 in grant funding. In addition to writing a manuscript on Deruta bella donna plates for Aracne Press, she has written for the Journal of Surface Design, Preview Art Magazine, Uppercase Magazine, an International Mosaic Journal, as well as a forthcoming article on internment objects for Italian Canadiana. She has also written and edited over 10 art exhibition catalogues. Dr. Clarke is a board member for the Society for the Museum of the Costume, and ICAP.