Karine Tsoumis

Senior Curator at Gardiner Museum

Karine Tsoumis is a specialist of the Italian Renaissance with a focus on sixteenth-century Venetian art, maiolica, and the material culture of the domestic space. She received her Masters’ Degree in Art History from McGill University (2005), and her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (2013). Karine joined the Gardiner Museum in 2012 as the curator of the historical collection. Since joining the Gardiner, she has led research on the permanent collections; been involved in the reinstallation of some of the Museum’s galleries; and curated two major exhibitions, Animal Stories: Friends, Foes, Fables and Fantasy (2013), and Janet Macpherson: A Canadian Bestiary (2017).She has also curated a range of thematic exhibitions including The Art of the Everyday: Faience in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century France (2013), The Joy of Collecting (2014), Powder and Patches: Porcelain for the Boudoir in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2016), and A Brilliant Invention: Majolica from the Rosalie Wise Sharp Collection (2017). Karine was co-editor and contributor to 30 Objects, 30 Insights (2014), a book of essays celebrating the Gardiner Museum’s collection. Her current research focuses on Renaissance maiolica considered in the context of trade and luxury objects in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a focus on the Venetian Republic. She is currently a Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University at the University of Toronto.