Mara Hofmann

Mara Hofmann is an art historian and a specialist in the art market. She is the Executive Director of Barovier&Toso Arte and a member of the Board of Directors of the Fondazione Barovier&Toso in Venice.
As Director of Lapis Lazuli: artE (2018-2024, London-Venice), she led an art advisory firm specialised in collection development and artist promotion. In this role, she managed the appraisal and brokerage of significant artworks in the international market. She also curated and
organized contemporary art exhibitions while developing an artist-in-residence program. Previously, she was the leading specialist for Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts at Sotheby's (2013-2018, London). In her academic career, she worked in London as research fellow at the Warburg Institute, the National Gallery and the British Library (2005-2013) and participated in exhibition catalogues for the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011); the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours (2012); and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2016); she also founded the National Gallery’s Raphael Research Resource, a digital initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation. She is the author of numerous publications focusing on the Gothic and Renaissance periods. In recent years she engaged increasingly with Contemporary Art, pursuing a creative dialogue between the past and the present.
In 2003, she was awarded a Feodor-Lynen-Scholarship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to pursue her post-doctoral thesis at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes in Paris. She received her PhD in Art History in 2002, and her MA in Art History and German Literature in 1998, from the Freie Universität Berlin.