Pia Brancaccio

Pia Brancaccio is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History where she teaches courses in the arts of South Asia and is responsible for the Asian Art Curriculum. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of ancient Gandhara (Pakistan) and the Deccan Plateau (India). She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in Western Deccan, including a monograph on The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad (2010) and the edited volume Living Rock (2013), and has recently expanded her interests to ancient Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean exchange networks. She has been also a longstanding collaborator of the ISMEO-Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan and has written on architecture, visual narratives, artistic workshops, and the multicultural fabric of Buddhism in Gandhara, and co-edited the book Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology (2006). Her research is published internationally, she serves on editorial boards of academic journals based in Europe and Asia, and is frequently invited as a speaker, panelist, and collaborator by institutions across the globe.

Prior to joining Drexel University, she was Research Associate at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and was a Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her research, publications, and extensive fieldwork carried out in South Asia have been supported by a variety of national and international grants.