Ashley Arico

Ashley Arico serves as the museum’s assistant curator of ancient Egyptian art in our Arts of Africa department.

Since joining the Art Institute in July 2017 as the museum’s first full-time specialist in the arts of ancient Egypt, she has launched a successful “Egyptian Art Pop-Up Talk” series and installed Ptolemaic Egyptian works in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art. Ashley is currently working on a new gallery of ancient Egyptian art, which will open in February 2022. She previously held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, and the Walters Art Museum, where she contributed to the exhibition Egypt’s Mysterious Book of the Faiyum (2013). She also excavated at the temple of the lioness-headed goddess Mut in Luxor, Egypt, and has served as an expert for Smithsonian Journeys’ “Ancient Egypt and the Nile” tour.

Ashley received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an MA and PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, where her research focused on Egyptian statuary as evidence for interconnections in the ancient world.