The appointment of Cristiana Perrella to lead the Vatican Academy of Fine Arts raises doubts. Feminist, queer activist and with no ties to sacred art. Is she the right profile?

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Cristiana Perrella has been appointed president of the Pontifical Insigne Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi at the Pantheon.

In Italy the news went unnoticed while abroad it provoked reactions of surprise and questions within the Catholic public opinion.

We usually do not deal with these “scandalisms” but in this case they seem rather justified to us.

Above all we ask ourselves a question: there are thousands of art experts in the international Catholic world, why did the choice fall precisely on an openly queer artist with no connection to Christian art?

Of course, Cristiana Perrella has every right to devote herself to her artistic interests. The perplexity is about who the real actor in the Vatican behind her appointment is.

The formal decree published on September 6, 2025 reports that the assignment of the role came from Leo XIV, but it is not clear whether he received adequate information.

 

 

Who is Cristiana Perrella, leader of the Pontifical academy

Born in 1965, Roman, Perrella is the current artistic director of MACRO and has a solid and varied cultural background. After prestigious experiences such as the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci and the Contemporary Arts Programme of the British School at Rome, she founded SACS in Palermo, later contributing to projects between art and science in Emilia Romagna.

She also curated the “Conciliazione 5” program promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, as a window onto contemporary art in Rome, on the occasion of the Jubilee 2025. A resume of considerable standing, then.

But there are other elements that raise doubts as to whether this is the right profile to run a Vatican academy.

In 2020, for example, Cristiana Perrella curated an exhibition dedicated to the Chinese photographer Ren Hang (1987-2017), selecting and presenting works that she herself defines “provocative in the exposure of sexual organs and in the poses, which sometimes refer to sadomasochism and fetishism“.

In another interview, Perrella reveals admiration for the irreverent artist Sarah Lucas, known for the photographic self-portrait in which she poses with two eggs in a frying pan placed over her breasts and for the phallic symbols that make up her works, such as the self-portrait in which she bites a banana.

On another occasion, Cristiana Perrella gives an interview, where she celebrates the Italian feminist movement that brought “enormous results”, such as the italian referendums on divorce and abortion.

 

Cristiana Perrella, a queer artist

She then refers to Lisetta Carmi’s photographs of the transvestites of the port of Genoa, which she celebrates like this: “It is incredible to think that those photos were taken in the mid-’60s with this idea of femininity as something yearned for, to be achieved”.

The transgender theme remains when she hopes to take up the vision of the Australian LGBTQ+ feminist Rosi Braidotti to talk about a nomadic subject “who also investigates their own sexuality in a very open way”. Braidotti is one of the godmothers of trans-feminism.

And Perrella continues saying she is also interested “in queer culture and in general in everything that flees simplicity and schematism”, probably referring to sexual binarism.

 

On Cristiana Perrella’s Instagram profile

That queer themes are her main interests is also evident from the Instagram profile of the new president of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts.

She opens a photographic exhibition on the posters of erotic cinema that invaded Naples in the ’70s-’80s, “revealing the process of sexual liberation underway”, she comments.

 

Perrella was also one of the supporters of the Zan bill against homophobia, on which even the Vatican Secretariat of State had to intervene concerned for the safeguarding of Catholics’ freedom of expression

 

In 2019 she posted an installation on which the phrase “God is created by man” is written in huge letters. Someone recently commented: “It seems appropriate to me for leading the Vatican fine arts”

 

And then homosexual embraces:

 

Cristiana Perrella posts a photograph of Rome’s Termini station crossed by a long rainbow carpet.

 

Another post is a manifesto against Western civilization, in the photo several black nuns can be seen

 

Finally the phallic symbols return

 

Cristiana Perrella, the right profile?

Everyone is free to post what they want and to have their ideas about the world, but it is evident that what Cristiana Perrella expresses does not exactly coincide with the concept of Christian art, nor with an anthropology of the human person coherent with the message of the Church.

If one considers that the Pontifical Insigne Academy of Fine Arts has in its statutes the purpose “to promote the study, practice and perfection of Letters and Fine Arts, with particular regard to literature of Christian inspiration and sacred art in all its expressions, and to promote the spiritual elevation of artists, in connection with the Pontifical Council for Culture”, we wonder whether Perrella’s profile is truly the right one.

Leo XIV was fully informed of Perrella’s ideological interests?