Graduate Student

Rae Di Cicco is a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in the modern art, design, and cultural history of Central Europe. Her work investigates issues of identity and politics faced in the region during the transition from imperial to national organization after World War I. Her master’s thesis, “Erika Giovanna Klien and Cosmopolitan Imagination in Post-Habsburg Austria,” explored the incorporation of signifiers of national artistic styles into Kineticist artist Erika Giovanna Klien’s artistic production as a kind of cosmopolitan imagination, visualizing – literally making visual – hybrid and shifting identity and multiple belonging. Her dissertation will expand on the work begun in her master’s on Klien and the Vienna-based modernist movement she was apart of in the 1920s, Kinetismus.