about me...Samantha De Tillio is a craft scholar, cross-genre writer, and curator thinking at the crossroads of craft, heritage, and embodied expression. Melding material-based knowledge with ancestral folk practices and mythology-based stoeytellling, she seeks the performative across art forms and explores what it means to live a life well crafted.
In 2023, she won the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing for her work, which has been published in GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, Metalsmith, and the Journal of Stained Glass, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs. In 2023, she was also Guest Curator and Editor of New Glass Review 43, an exhibition-in-print, oublished annually by the Corning Museum of Glass. De Tillio has over a decade of experience as a museum curator, working with institutions including the Corning Museum of Glass, Museum of Arts and Design, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, among others. Her scope of experience includes modern and contemporary American Craft and visual culture with an emphasis on postwar glass and the evolution of the craft movement from the Arts and Crafts to today. She is interested in the intersection of art practice and life practice. De Tillio is a Contributing Editor of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (2019-), where, since 2015, she writes on themes of performance, gender, and ecology as it relates to glass. GLASS is the repository of her trailblazing research on glass and performance, which is featured in three articles published Summer 2022, Summer 2023, and Winter 2023/24. The scholarly triptych traces the development of performative glass from the mid-twentieth century through today. From 2013 to 2022, De Tillio was a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, where she ended her tenure as Curstor of Collections. During that time, she oversaw, researched, and exhibited the permanent collection (among other temporary loan exhibitions), and managed the acquisitions program. She curated and project managed over a dozen exhibitions and permanent collection installations; produced and contributed to four exhibition catalogues; and facilitated the accessions of over three hundred artworks. Her projects have included Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy, Burke Prize 2019 & 2018, Craft Front & Center (featuring Marvin Lipofsky "Glass Forms"), Wendell Castle Remastered, The Green Book: Race and Segregstion in Jim Crow America (an exhibition and study center), as well as a reinstallation of the museum's permanent display of Studio Glass goblets, among numerous other projects. |
De Tillio is engaged in ongoing research on the groundbreaking fiber artist Dorian Zachai (1932-2015), the first study of the artist's life and work, which she presented at the 2019 College Art Association conference. \\n
De Tillio's interests also include the praxis of "crafted lifeways" or the creative potential of craft to contribute to regenerative lifestyles and bioregionalism including through material literacy and folk practices. She is also interestrd in heritage craft and foodways, in particular the craft of cooking and its relational identities.\\n
from 2012 to 2013, she was Tiffany & Company Foundation Curatorial Fellow in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she contributed to the reinstallation of the Arts & Crafts galleries, the installation of the Worsham-Rockefeller period room, an exhibition of George Schastey aesthetic furniture, and curated an exhibit of works on paper by Louis C. Tiffany. She has also held various curatorial and research positions at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, and the Albany Institute of History and Art, as well as curated independent projects.\\n
De Tillio has lectured widely, including at the College Art Association conference and the Bard Graduate Center; was a visiting artist at the Rochester Institute of Technology; and has juried numerous exhibitions, residencies, and prizes.\\n
She has a MA in the History of Decorative Arts from the Smithsonian Associates with George Mason University, and a BA in History from the University at Albany with minors in Ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations, and Spanish; she also studied drawing and painting.\\n
De Tillio is Board President of R'ville Stage Creations, a community theater in Upstate New York. Her personal practice includes reading, cooking, embroidery, drumming, gardening, drawing, and shrine making. She is keeper of her familial knowledge and heirloom objects and most notably a mother and wife. \\n
De Tillio's interests also include the praxis of "crafted lifeways" or the creative potential of craft to contribute to regenerative lifestyles and bioregionalism including through material literacy and folk practices. She is also interestrd in heritage craft and foodways, in particular the craft of cooking and its relational identities.\\n
from 2012 to 2013, she was Tiffany & Company Foundation Curatorial Fellow in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she contributed to the reinstallation of the Arts & Crafts galleries, the installation of the Worsham-Rockefeller period room, an exhibition of George Schastey aesthetic furniture, and curated an exhibit of works on paper by Louis C. Tiffany. She has also held various curatorial and research positions at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, and the Albany Institute of History and Art, as well as curated independent projects.\\n
De Tillio has lectured widely, including at the College Art Association conference and the Bard Graduate Center; was a visiting artist at the Rochester Institute of Technology; and has juried numerous exhibitions, residencies, and prizes.\\n
She has a MA in the History of Decorative Arts from the Smithsonian Associates with George Mason University, and a BA in History from the University at Albany with minors in Ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations, and Spanish; she also studied drawing and painting.\\n
De Tillio is Board President of R'ville Stage Creations, a community theater in Upstate New York. Her personal practice includes reading, cooking, embroidery, drumming, gardening, drawing, and shrine making. She is keeper of her familial knowledge and heirloom objects and most notably a mother and wife. \\n