Jocelyne Rotily is Doctor in Art History and in American Civilization. She is specialized in the history of American art collecting and in the study of modern American art, including arts of the minorities. Since 1996, she has been working for Leonardo/L'OLATS, as a curator, and graphic designer. She is in charge of two projects : " Virtual Africa ", a multidisciplinary exhibition on traditional and contemporary African cultures ; and " Frank J. Malina, Kinetic artist and Engineer in Astronautics ". She is also research assistant at the Varian Fry Foundation, in France, a foundation of which purpose is to bring to the largest public audience and to schools and universities in France the memory of the humanitarian resistance of Varian Fry and of the American rescue and relief organization he established in Marseilles during World War II.
As a fellow at the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence and at the Ecole Française de Rome, she first wrote a biographical study on the American art historian Bernard Berenson, focusing on his relationships with French intellectuals (André Gide and Marcel Proust...) and on his contribution to the development of Renaissance art collecting in the United States. She published a few articles in literary journals such as " L'Infini " and " Critique " in which she demonstrated her strong interest in building close connections between visual arts and literature. As a specialist in the history of French American artistic relationships, she more recently published a book untitled " Artistes américains à Paris, 1914-1939 " (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1999) in which she examines the role played by Paris and its artistic avant-garde in the birth of a typically " American " art.
She was a teacher at Harvard University in the Art History Department and in Romance Languages Department. In France, she also taught undergraduate classes on American art (19th and 20th centuries) at the University of Aix-en-Provence.