Elisa Palomino

Elisa Palomino, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI), a Max Planck Society research institute dedicated to art history in transcultural and global perspectives. She concurrently serves as Research Associate at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center specializing in Arctic Indigenous Fashion.

With a PhD in Anthropology and Sustainable Fashion from the London College of Fashion, Dr. Palomino bridges academic research and industry practice through her 25-year career designing for luxury fashion houses including John Galliano and Christian Dior. She previously served as Director of Fashion Print at Central Saint Martins for a decade and maintains an international lecturing profile.

Her research focuses on Indigenous knowledge systems, ethnobiology, and traditional textile crafts with emphasis on leathers and production techniques across historical periods from the Ancient Near East to contemporary sustainable fashion. She examines human relationships with biological organisms in traditional Arctic and Subarctic societies, and explores material culture exchanges between Native Arctic cultures and European courts.

• Arctic Fashion Anthropology
• Traditional Ecological Knowledge
• Indigenous Material Heritage
• Historical Leather Production
• Sustainable Textile Innovation
• Art History-Fashion-Science Convergence

• Fulbright Fellowship
• Kluge Fellowship at Library of Congress
• Max Planck Institute Fellowships
• Horizon 2020 FishSkin Project Leadership

Dr. Palomino's EU-funded research projects integrate historical art scholarship with contemporary sustainability challenges. Her unique perspective combines museum studies, material innovation, and intangible cultural heritage preservation, particularly regarding aquatic landscapes of ancient Anatolian civilizations and early modern material culture.