is an art historian, curator, and digital humanist. She completed her PhD in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA), She also holds a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate through UCLA's Digital Humanities Program. Her research interrogates modes of publishing, display, and information capture in museums and archives that illustrate a break from “traditional” models, and argues that digital modalities provide a distinctly different paradigm for epistemologies of art and culture that produce greater contextualized understandings. Specifically, she is interested in spectrums of immersive experience within GLAM organizations as offered by technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360 photo and video capture.
For over a decade, she has worked with museums including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.), the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (Paris, France), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, California). Francesca has garnered significant experience in developing and teaching digital tools for art historical practice and humanistic research, such as The Getty Scholars’ Workspace™ for conducting collaborative arts research and preservation. She currently works as a Digital Research Consultant at UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education.