Leonardo Impett, Ph.D.

Leonardo Impett is Research Group Leader at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and Bye-Fellow in Digital Humanities at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His research focuses on crossing AI (Artificial Intelligence) approaches to art history with art-historical approaches to AI, particularly examining bias and visual ideology in AI from the perspective of art history and visual studies. Alongside his research in digital art history, he frequently works with machine learning in arts and culture, including for the Liverpool Biennial, the Royal Opera House, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Leonardo has a background in information engineering and machine learning, having worked or studied at the Cambridge Machine Learning Lab, the Cambridge Computer Lab’s Rainbow Group, and Microsoft Research Cairo; he was previously Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Durham University. His Ph.D. (at EPFL) focused on the use of computer vision for the distant reading of the history of art. In 2018, Leonardo was Digital Humanities Fellow at Villa I Tatti – the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; from 2018 to 2020, he was Digital Humanities Scientist at the Bibliotheca Hertziana.