Kayla Bruce (she/her) is a third-year PhD student in Art History at Temple University. Her research focuses on Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, particularly painting and print culture in Northern and Central Italy from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth century. Her interests include mythological and folkloric imagery, the interaction of vernacular and classical traditions, artistic exchange between Italy and Northern Europe, and the ways images transform as they move between regions and cultural contexts.  

She earned her double major in History and Art History at Old Dominion University in 2021. She earned her M.A. in Humanities with a Visual Studies focus at Old Dominion University in 2023. Her M.A. qualifying thesis, titled From Donatello to Michelangelo: A Franciscan Angel, examined Michelangelo’s relationship with the Franciscan Order as well as the development and use of an angel-head motif associated with the Virgin Mary in Florentine art.  

Her past experience includes participating in an archaeological dig at the Roman site of Volubilis in Morrocco. She also worked for the Barry Art Museum and the Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Gallery in Norfolk, VA. She is currently an adjunct art history professor at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. In October 2026, she will present her research at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Chicago with a paper titled “The Quintessential Venetian Portrait: The Hidden Madonna of the Frick Saint Francis.”