Kelli Wood joined the School of Art in August 2019 as an assistant professor of Renaissance art history. Prior to coming to UT, she held a Fulbright at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, a Kress fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and a three-year postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows.

Professor Wood’s research focuses on the relationships between art, games, and sports from the sixteenth century onward. She is completing her first book manuscript, The Art of Play: Games in Early Modern Italy. Wood’s intellectual interests extend forward from the early modern period, and she has taken a longue durée approach to understanding modern board games and video games, as well as serving on the editorial board of The Video Game Art Reader. She has also done significant work in museum studies and cultural curation, and she is teaching a course on the history of exhibitions and museums in spring 2020. Professor Wood also is guest curating a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, forthcoming in anticipation of the 2022 World Cup. An SEC alumna, Wood is excited to bring her specialties into the classroom at UT and looks forward to engaging students by making connections between the Renaissance and the present.