Jason Di Resta

Jason Di Resta is research associate in the Italian paintings department at the National Gallery of Art. He received his doctorate in the history of art from the Johns Hopkins University, and holds an MA from Syracuse University. Di Resta joined the Italian paintings department in 2013. He has also served as visiting lecturer of art at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and as research assistant to the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA).

Di Resta is the recipient of a number of awards, including a Samuel H. Kress Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at CASVA and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University.

His research interests include the relationship between art and geography in early modern Europe, the role that style plays in processes of identity formation, and the phenomenology of the Christian devotional image. He is currently working on a transnational study that addresses the material vitalism of human bones as artistic media in seventeenth-century Capuchin mortuary chapels. Di Resta has presented aspects of his research at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the National Gallery of Art, and the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America. 

Di Resta is the author of the entry on the 2014 acquisition Scenes from the Passion of Christ: The Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and the Descent into Limbo [entire triptych] by Andrea di Vanni in the National Gallery of Art Online Editions catalog Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.