Giulia Gilesi is a PhD Student in Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Her research focuses on museum storage and analyses the spread of Conservation and Collection centres in Europe. Thanks to the partnership with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, she participates in internal staff meetings related to the development of the "Grande MAXXI" Master Plan, which entails the construction of the MAXXI Hub, the first Collection Centre in Italy. During her visiting period at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, she is part of the Organisation Committee for the International Conference "Museum Storage: Current Situation and New Challenges" (29-31 October 2024) and she studies the case of the Centre de conservation du Louvre.
After her BA in Modern Literature at “La Sapienza” University of Rome, Giulia graduated in Italian studies, European literary cultures, Linguistics as a MA student at Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. Then, she gained her second MA in Museum Studies at University College London (UCL) in 2018 with a dissertation on the concept of visible storage and the case of the Ceramics Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
Giulia has worked on collection management and care projects for public and private institutions in Italy and the UK, such as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) in London and the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome. Before her PhD, she joined as the collections assistant at Kosmos, the Natural History Museum of the University of Pavia and she took part in the project of the relocation of the historical collection into a new visitable storage and the re-organisation of storage areas. While working, she attended, thanks to the scholarship awarded by Fondazione Cariplo, the Advanced Training Course in Management of artistic-cultural heritage and corporate collections organised by Gallerie d’Italia Academy of Intesa Sanpaolo.