Sarah K. Kozlowski (BA Wheaton College, MA Williams College, PhD Yale University) is an art historian, Associate Director and Head of Scholarly Research & Programs at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities "La Capraia" at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples.

Kozlowski specializes in the art of medieval and Renaissance Italy and Europe. Her current research centers on Naples and southern Italy in its broader geographic and cultural contexts, exploring in particular how artworks’ materials, movements, and formats create meaning. In her research, teaching, and program building, she brings together close study of artworks, in all their material and historical complexities, and investigation of broader artistic patterns across time and place.

Recent and forthcoming publications include the monograph Portable Panel Paintings at the Angevin Court of Naples: Mobility and Materiality in the Trecento Mediterranean (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022); a special issue of Convivium (X, no. 1, Spring 2023) dedicated to the architecture of medieval port cities, co-edited with Kristen Streahle; a report on new archival evidence related to the multipart paintings of John Wilcox in Athenaeum Review (8, Summer 2023); an article on the itineraries of the Diptych of Andrew III of Hungary (2023); and “Touch, Movement, and Transformation in the Diptych of Delphine de Signe” for the edited volume Women and Gender in Trecento Art and Architecture (forthcoming). Current research projects include “An English Alabaster in Aragonese Naples,” “A Ruby between the Courts of Hungary and Naples,” and Touch, Movement, and Transformation in Fourteenth-Century Diptychs.

She designed, founded, and directs the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities "La Capraia," a collaboration between the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. The Center at La Capraia engages Capodimonte, the city of Naples, and southern Italy as a laboratory for new research in the cultural histories of port cities and the mobilities of artworks, people, technologies, and ideas. Through research residencies, site-based conferences and seminars, and collaborative projects—all of which draw on direct study of objects, sites, collections, and archives in Naples and environs—the Center explores Naples and southern Italy as a site of cultural encounter, exchange, and transformation, at the intersection of the global and the local.

At the Center at La Capraia, she has organized and co-organized site-based conferences and seminars including Metabolic Naples (2024); Soundscapes of Naples: From the Medieval to the Modern (2023); Porcelain Rooms in a Global Context (2022); and Gateways to Medieval Naples (2022).

At the O’Donnell Institute she heads and co-heads research projects including a collaboration with the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database Project to collect, catalogue, and map historical images of medieval monuments in southern Italy; a collaboration with the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture to build digital models of the eighteenth-century porcelain rooms at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte and the Royal Palace at Aranjuez; and a collaboration with the Ioannes Project to document, study, and exhibit the work of the painter John Wilcox. From 2024, she heads The John Wilcox Archive at the O’Donnell Institute.

In the O’Donnell Institute’s Master’s Program in Art History (which she designed, and which welcomed its first class in 2018), she teaches an annual graduate seminar, advises Master’s theses, and guides student collaboration on O’Donnell Institute research projects. In Summer 2023 she co-organized and co-led Art and Archaeology on the Bay of Naples, Antiquity to Today, an O’Donnell Institute Master’s Program study residency hosted by The Oplontis Project and the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities "La Capraia."

Her research and collaborative projects have been supported by grants from the Getty Research Institute, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Medieval Academy of America, the Pittsburgh Foundation, Phi Beta Kappa, and institutional/departmental awards from Wheaton College, Williams College, and Yale University. She has presented her work at the annual conferences of the Renaissance Society of America, the Medieval Academy of America, College Art Association, and the Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference, and at institutions including Yale University, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, the Courtauld Institute of Art, KU Leuven, University of Houston, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, she lives in Dallas with her husband and son.