Alina Payne is Paul E. Geier Director of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
She is the author of The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (1999), Rudolf Wittkower (2010), From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism(2012), The Telescope and the Compass. Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo (2012), and L'architecture parmi les arts: Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l'Italie de la Renaissance (2016).
She has edited numerous volumes of essays including, most recently, The Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (2016), Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with G. Necipoglu, 2016) and Revision, Revival and Return. The Renaissance in the Nineteenth-Century (2018).
In 2006 she was awarded the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities (2006-12). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.