Curator of Russian Porcelain and Ceramics, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Treasures from the Hermitage: The Story of Russian Porcelain

Dr. Ekaterina Khmelnitskaya—who goes by Tina—is a curator of the Russian Porcelain and Ceramics collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  She spent the first two months of 2012 as a Fulbright Scholar at the Library of Congress.  Her Fulbright continues through June 2012 while she is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

A 2001 graduate of St. Petersburg State University, she defended her doctoral dissertation in 2007 on the styles of the interiors of the palace of the Romanov Grand Duke Vladimir.   Since 2001 she has worked at the State Hermitage Museum, and since 2003 she has been a curator of Russian porcelain.  She has received research support for work in Germany from the German Chancellor Fellowship and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and from the Max-Planck-Institut for research in Italy—Florence in 2010 and Rome in 2011.

Tina is the author of  more than 40 scholarly publications, including guidebooks as well as scholarly articles and books on the porcelain collection of the State Hermitage Museum.  She participated in organizing over twenty Hermitage exhibitions, including exhibitions in Japan, Germany, and Scotland as well as Russia.  She was in charge of  two porcelain exhibitions: “Under the Imperial Monogram: Porcelain from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum” (with Irina Bagdasarova) at the Kremlin in Moscow, 2007; and “Heraldry on Russian Porcelain” (with Irina Bagdasarova) at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in 2008.

She has made presentations on the porcelain collection of the Hermitage Museum and on her current research devoted to the Russian sculptors who were affiliated with the work of the Imperial Porcelain Factory and who immigrated after 1917 and continued their work in Europe and in the United States.  Tina has been an invited presenter at the International Ceramic Fair and Seminar- Haughton Fair in London (2008 and 2010); the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Florence, 2010);  Biblioteca Hertziana  (Rome, 2011) and others.