Carolyn M. Laferrière

Carolyn M. Laferrière is a specialist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and archaeology, with an emphasis on the connection between art and ritual. She joined the Museum in 2022 as the Assistant Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art with additional oversight of the Byzantine and Islamic collections, before becoming Associate Curator in 2024 and Curator in 2026. At the Museum, she curated the exhibition Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black, featuring the work of the Philadelphia-based ceramic artist who draws inspiration from Greek ceramics. She is also working on a larger loan exhibition, co-curated with Professor of Art & Archaeology Nathan Arrington, on intimacy and ancient Greek funerary objects. 

She is the author of Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art: Seeing the Songs of the Gods, published in 2024 with Cambridge University Press. She is currently at work on her second book project, Timeless Art in Ancient Greece, which examines the intersection of sacred time and visual style. She is co-editing Phenomenology and the Painted Vase, forthcoming with the University of Wisconsin Press in August 2026. She is also the Associate Editor for the journal Greek and Roman Musical Studies. 

Before joining the Museum, she was a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow at the Center for the Premodern World and the Department of Classics at the University of Southern California (2020–22). In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, she oversaw a lecture series on “Iconoclasm in the Premodern World” and contributed to The Silk Roads: Connecting Communities, Markets, and Minds Since Antiquity, an exhibition at Doheny Library. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate with Archaia and a lecturer in the Departments of the History of Art and Classics at Yale University. In 2018–19, she curated Sights and Sounds of Ancient Ritual at the Yale University Art Gallery. She earned a BA summa cum laude in Art History, and Classics & Religion from Carleton University, an MA in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of British Columbia, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in History of Art from Yale University.