PEOPLE

Mark Mazower has written several books, including Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998), Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (2004) and Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2012). What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (2017), explores his father’s family and its revolutionary past. His most recent book is The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (2021). He is an historian of modern Europe and has a particular interest in modern Greece. His reviews and commentaries on current affairs appear in the Financial Times and elsewhere.

Mark is responsible for the Institute’s overall cultural and intellectual direction.

Marie d’Origny was the Deputy Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library from 2009 to 2017. Previously she worked in film preservation and programming. She holds a B.F.A. in Cinema Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New York University.

Marie manages the overall administration of the Institute, including financial matters, programming, and relations with Reid Hall and other institutions.

Email Marie: md3155(at)columbia.edu

After graduating from the Universidad Externado de Colombia where she majored in journalism and completed an internship at the Colombian Embassy in Paris, Sari Castro worked in the cultural department of the Alliance française de Bogota. In 2020, she moved to France, where she obtained a master’s degree in international cultural project management at the Universite Lyon II.

Before joining the Institute as the Programming and Communications Assistant, Sari worked at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris in administration and production at the Direction des études chorégraphiques and organized the Soirées Nomades series at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain.

Sari manages the Institute’s programming and its communications efforts

Email Sari: sc5452(at)columbia.edu

Alice Pittini holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Management for Arts, Culture, and Communication and a Master’s in Visual Arts Management from Bocconi University. She later moved to Paris to pursue an exchange program at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Before joining the Institute, she worked in the contemporary art field as an assistant to a curator and art critic in Milan and as part of the team of Kooness, a contemporary art marketplace. Alice also contributed to a museum digitalization initiative at the Wikimedia Foundation. Her education and professional paths are shaped by a deep interest in the cultural and artistic landscape, which she brings to her work in support of the Institute’s activities and its Fellows.