Directory

Biography

Professor Durantas has a master’s degree in art history from Hunter College and has studied abroad in Rome, Paris, and London. She has taught art history at CUNY Kingsborough for the past sixteen years and at the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology for the past six.  Professor Durantas specializes in medieval art and has been lecturing at the Met Cloisters for almost twenty years. Besides her love for all things medieval, she also has a passion for ancient Egyptian art and is a lecturer at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where she gives tours of the Egyptian collection. She also likes to dabble in nineteenth-century NYC history: she’s worked as a preservation and restoration volunteer of nineteenth-century tomb sculpture at Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn, she gives tours on the history and architecture of Central Park, and she has curated an exhibition about the art of mourning in nineteenth-century America at the Kingsborough Art Museum.

Courses

Art 31 (Survey of Art History: Survey from Prehistory to the Present), online and in-person

Art 33 (Survey of Art History I: From Ancient to Renaissance Art), online and in-person

Art 22 (Medieval Art), online

Art 38 (Renaissance Art), online and in-person

Education

BA, St. John’s University, 1999
MA, Hunter College, CUNY, 2009

College Teaching

In addition to CUNY Kingsborough, Professor Durantas teaches at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, where she obtained a Certificate of Continuous Employment in 2024. She’s also taught at CUNY Bronx Community College, St. John’s University, and was a Teaching Assistant at CUNY Hunter College.

Research Interests:

Monastic art and architecture; medieval plants and their uses-especially in magic; Egyptian art.

Professional Memberships  

International Center of Medieval Art

Medieval Academy of America

Renaissance Society of America