VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Leo XIV has named a female “artist” who published homoerotic and sadomasochistic photographs as the new president of the Pontifical Academy for Fine Arts.
The Vatican announced on Saturday that the pope appointed Roman museum director Cristiana Perrella to the position. The Pontifical Academy for Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon was founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III for the purpose of promoting, studying, and cultivating sacred art and Christian-inspired literature.
Perrella is known as an “expert” in contemporary art. She has been director of the MACRO museum in Rome since March of this year and previously taught “cultural management” at the San Raffaele University in Milan.
Perrella has hosted multiple obscene, pro-LGBT, and sadomasochistic displays in the past. In 2020, she curated an exhibition called “Nudes” featuring 90 photographs by Chinese artist Ren Hang at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Italy. Most of the photographs showed naked persons, with some of them featuring homoerotic poses. The official exhibition description stated that some of the photos “at times refer to sadomasochism and fetishism.”
In 2019, the Italian artist directed the exhibition “Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960–Today.” The display promoted nightclub culture and featured sexualized, pro-LGBT exposés. In an interview with Sleek magazine, she lamented that nightclubs are “increasingly under threat” due to closures. The exhibition also highlighted “queer club culture,” and Perrella stressed the role of nightclubs for the LGBT movement, since clubs “were places where people could be themselves and affirm their identity publically [sic].”
In 2021, Perrella curated an exhibition titled “Cult Fiction,” featuring photographs from Marialba Russo documenting the explicit advertisement posters for pornographic movies that were seen on the streets of Aversa and Naples during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The theme of the exhibition was “sexual liberation.”
Perrella has been a member of the Pontifical Academy for Fine Arts since June 2022, when she was appointed by Pope Francis. Perrella is responsible for the program of the “Conciliazione 5” exhibition space of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, which was inaugurated for the Holy Year 2025. In the wake of the jubilee, she also curated a site-specific art installation in Rome’s Rebibbia prison, where Pope Francis opened his own Holy Door on December 26, 2024.
