Iznik Ceramics at the Benaki Museum

John Carswell graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 1951, and subsequently worked as an archaeological draughtsman at Jericho and throughout the Near East, before joining the American University of Beirut (1956-76), where he became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts. He was Visiting Professor at SOAS, London University from 1957–58; Curator of the Oriental Institute Museum and Director of the Smart Museum, University of Chicago, 1978-88; Vice President and Chairman of the Islamic Department, Sotheby’s, London 1988–98. He is now an independent scholar living in Spain; Mina Moraitou completed her studies at SOAS, University of London where she received a Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art in 1992 and an MA in the History of Islamic Art in 1996. Since 1992, she has been working at the Benaki Museum: she contributed to the creation of the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in July 2004 and became curator in 2012. She has coordinated and curated several exhibitions: Thomas Hope: Drawings of Ottoman Istanbul (Athens, 2016, Sharjah 2017); Iznik- a Fascination with Ceramics (2017); Islamic Calligraphy: The Art of Iranian Writing (2018) and Roads of Arabia (2019); Melanie Gibson is senior editor of the Gingko Library Art Series.