Maria Kokkori

Biography

Maria Kokkori is Associate Research Professor and Senior Scientist at the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and, following postdoctoral fellowships at the Courtauld Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, spent ten years as a scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago. A heritage scientist and art historian, she specializes in the material study and preservation of modern and contemporary art. Her work integrates conservation science, materials analysis, and AI-driven imaging to investigate artworks, develop new tools for cultural heritage research, and foster collaborations among museums, universities, and scientific laboratories.

Publications

Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond, eds. Maria Kokkori, Christina Lodder and Maria Mileeva (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2013)

“Les laboratoires artistiques de Vitebsk pour la reconstruction du monde,” in Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch - L’avant-garde russe à Vitebsk (1918-1922), ed. Angela Lampe, exh. cat. (Centre Pompidou, 2018)

“More Than a Pure Technical Sensation’: Twentieth-Century Metallic Paints, Their Formulations and Use in Paintings,” in ICOM-CC 18th Triennial Conference Preprints, ed. J. Bridgland (2017)

“Metallic Factures: László Moholy-Nagy and Kazimir Malevich,” Leonardo (2017)

“László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting Materials: From Substance to Light,” Leonardo (2017)

“From the Streets to the Canvas: on the Use of Bituminous Asphalt in Early Soviet Constructivist Paintings,” in Painting Techniques, History, Materials and Studio Practice, ed. Arie Wallert (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2017)

“The Painting Techniques of Kazimir Malevich: 1900-1910,” in Painting Techniques, History, Materials and Studio Practice, ed. Arie Wallert (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2017)

“Materials and Meanings: analyzing Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension’,” in Advances in the Non-Invasive Analysis of Painted Surfaces (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2016)

“Gloss Paints in Late Paintings by Francis Picabia: a Multi-Analytical Study,” Applied Physics A: Materials Science and Processing (2016)

“Synergistic Use of Py–THM–GCMS, DTMS, and ESI–MS for the Characterization of the Organic Fraction of Modern Enamel Paints,” Heritage Science (2015)