The director of the Studio for Art, Faith & History, Dr. John Skillen (Ph.D., Duke University), served for fifteen years as the medieval and Renaissance literature specialist in the English Department of Gordon College (Wenham, MA). For a decade, Dr. Skillen resided most of the year in Orvieto, Italy as the inaugural director of the arts-oriented semester program in Orvieto sponsored by Gordon College, an admired undergraduate program now under the gifted directorship of Matthew Doll.

For several years Skillen worked in the Global Education Office at Gordon College developing several new international programs. Until his recent retirement from the College, he served as Senior Advisor of a new track in the graduate program in educational leadership designed for administrators and teachers from classical-Christian schools.

The Studio for Art, Faith & History became an independent entity in 2005, developing projects in the arts offering creative contemporary responses to pre-modern traditions in the visual arts, theater, and music. Since 2013, Dr. Skillen has directed a wide array of summer and winter seminars and retreats from the Studio’s home-base in Orvieto, Italy. He has worked closely with the Society for Classical Learning and Classical Academic Press to offer programs for students and teachers from the growing classical-Christian schooling movement.

Participants in the Studio’s activities are invited to engage the traditions lived out by artists, poets, and saints of the past and to enter into a dialogue about the interplay of faith, art, community, and society. Our goal is for participants to encounter places where vestiges of classical-Christian civilization invite us to reform aspects of our own cultural conditions and contemporary practices.

An intention of the Studio has always been to draw on and benefit the community of Orvieto who has given such warm hospitality to us mainly-American sojourners and pilgrims.

Among the Studio’s contributions to the town have been several international conferences (such as the “Eucharist & Eschatology: Art and Theology in the Duomo of Orvieto,” co-developed by Dr. Skillen with Mons. Timothy Verdon, now the Director of the Museum of the Works of the Cathedral in Florence).

The town of Orvieto co-sponsored several exhibitions in its main gallery, including paintings by contemporary American artists Bruce Herman and Edward Knippers, whose work embodies a dialogue with the tradition of scriptural narrative. (An essay by Herman on this website recounts his experience.)

New York City theater artist Karin Coonrod has brought together Italian, North American and European musicians and theater artists to create several cycles of medieval religious dramas, performed as a pilgrimage through salvation history in the streets and piazzas and churches of Orvieto. (Read Coonrod’s account of “Strangers and Other Angels.”)

In recent years, Dr. Skillen has worked closely with Orvieto-based theater director, actor, and script-writer Andrea Brugnera and his KaminaTeatro to create and produce eight plays based on ancient and modern figures from Christian tradition (described in detail on this website here).

Dr. Skillen's 2016 book, Putting Art (back) in its Place (Hendrickson Publishers) gives an account of the community-and-site-specific places in which art functioned in medieval-Renaissance Italy, and suggests the value of putting the work of art back in the places where communities of faith perform their work.  

His recent book Making School Beautiful (Classical Academic Press, 2020) serves the classical schooling movement by demonstrating that the classical liberal arts of language and thought, and of the mathematical arts, provide still-timely principles of architectural design, from classroom to campus.

Professor Skillen’s essays on the arts and tradition have appeared in IMAGE journal (including his profile of theater artist Karin Coonrod), the journal of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA), the FORMA journal of the CiRCE Institute, the web-based ArtWay, and Cardus’s Comment journal.  He has contributed entries to the Visual Commentary on Scripture and an entry on Murals in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, and brief essays for the blogs of the American Bible Society and CIVA and the Classical Academic Press.