Lisa DeLeonardis joined the faculty in 2004 as the jointly appointed Associate Curator of Art of the Ancient Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art and lecturer in the Department of the History of Art. She assumed the Austen-Stokes Professorship with the department in 2009. She has developed course curricula in the ancient and colonial Americas and advises students in the department and the Archaeology major.

Her intellectual interests center on the visual culture of the Americas with particular attention to the ancient and early modern Andes. Ongoing research has centered on south coastal Peru where she has developed a body of work on Paracas art and architecture. She has examined the human body in relation to the sacred landscape, offering practices, ancestor veneration, and the practice of fragmentation. She continues to investigate questions of color and ceramic techné with experimentation of mineral and plant-based pigments. Her research on early modern Peru examines the transition of Andean artists in Spanish colonial society and how new forms of visual articulation arose. Central to her current project is the architecture and social history of Santa Cruz de Lancha, a vineyard managed by the Society of Jesus in Pisco (DeLeonardis 2020 provides an overview). In a spin-off of the project, she investigated the material and design choices that figured in the transatlantic response to earthquakes in Peru and Italy. This work was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation. The research culminates in a forthcoming monograph, Santa Cruz de Lancha: Architecture and the Making of Place in Eighteenth-Century Peru. The book centers on the architectural landscape of the Jesuit provincial house and its two attendant haciendas. It is the first written work to address industrial architecture and to document the earthquakes, pirate attacks, and health epidemics that affected the progress and demise of the province. Broader theoretical questions are probed about how the Society of Jesus realized its missionization program in Latin America in concert with Indigenous and African artists.

DeLeonardis directs the annual Distinguished Lecture in Art of the Ancient Americas and the Stokes Family Research Stipend award. She is an affiliate of the Museo Regional de Ica (Peru), and has lectured for the Pontificía Universidad la Católica, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, and Universidad Alas Peruanas. She currently serves on the executive committee of the Institute of Andean Research. For ten years she was president of the Archaeological Institute of America, Baltimore Society.

Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and through fellowships with National Gallery of Art, Dumbarton Oaks, and John Carter Brown Library. She is the recent recipient of the Charles K. Williams II Rome Prize fellowship in Historic Preservation and Conservation, which she undertook at the American Academy in Rome.  

Prior to her post at Hopkins, DeLeonardis served on the editorial board and coordinated the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies 1530–1900, with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

DeLeonardis is a published illustrator and photographer.

Along with course offerings, DeLeonardis teaches and supervises theses in art history and archaeology and mentors student-curated exhibitions in the Archaeological Museum.

• Art of the Ancient Americas, 010.105
• Ancient Andean Art, 010.365
• Native American Art, 010.366
• Colonial Art of Peru, 010.320
• Body and Soul: Medicine in the Ancient Americas, 010.350
• Ancient Americas Object Workshop, 010.390
• Tombs for the Living, 010.398
• Ancient Americas Metallurgy, 010.407
• Problems in Art of the Ancient Americas, 010.334
• The Stone and the Thread, 010.389
• Americas in Motion, 010.214
• Art and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Peru, 010.635
• Latin American Baroque Art and Architecture, 010.802
• Directed Readings in Latin American Colonial Art, 010.801

Most undergraduate seminars include special guest lectures and collections study in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum and Mid-Atlantic repositories. Student-curated exhibitions arise occasionally from course offerings.

Select articles and book chapters

From the Inside Looking Out: Paracas Perspectives on Chavín. In Reconsidering the Chavín Phenomenon in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Richard Burger and Jason S. Nesbitt, pp. 271-297. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection Washington, D.C. (2023).

Native Americans/South America/Visual Arts. In Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, pp. 927-934. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin (2022).

Modeling the Sacred: The Pyramidal Form and Its Resonance in Paracas Sculptural Ceramics. Journal of Latin American Visual Culture 4 (2):10-28 (2022).

The Splendor of Baroque Visual Arts. In A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, second edition, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén, pp. 132-151. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., London (2022); first edition, Blackwell, 2008.

Paredes ingrávidas del efecto teatral: la persistencia del pasado en la arquitectura virreinal. In El arte antes de la historia: hacia una historia del arte andino antiguo, edited by Marco Curátola, Cécile Michaud, Joanne Pillsbury, pp. 509–541. Colección Estudios Andinos 29. Pontificía Universidad la Católica del Perú (2020).

A Material and Technical Study of Paracas Painted Ceramics (co-authored with Dawn Kriss, Ellen Howe, Judith Levinson,  Federico Carò, and Adriana Rizzo). Antiquity 92 (366): 1492–1510 (2018).

Encoded Process, Embodied Meaning in Paracas Post-Fired Ceramics. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, pp. 129-166. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. (2016).

Alonso Borregán. In Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos 1530-1900, vol. II. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., pp. 899-900. Colección Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (2016); English edition with National Gallery of Art and University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Alonso Carrió de la Vandera (Concolorcorvo). In Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos 1530-1900, vol. II. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., pp. 953-960. Colección Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (2016); English edition with National Gallery of Art and University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Charles Darwin. In Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos 1530-1900, vol. II. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., pp. 1055-1063. Colección Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (2016); English edition with National Gallery of Art and University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Catalina de Erauso. In Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos 1530-1900, vol. II. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., pp. 1085-1090. Colección Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (2016); English edition with National Gallery of Art and University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Francisco Núñez de Piñeda y Buscañán. In Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos 1530-1900, vol. III. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., pp. 1505-1509. Colección Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (2016); English edition with National Gallery of Art and University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Pedro de Oña. In Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos 1530-1900, vol. III. Joanne Pillsbury, ed., pp. 1533-1537. Colección Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (2016); English edition with National Gallery of Art and University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

La sustancia y el contexto de las ofrendas rituales de la cerámica Paracas. Boletin de Pontificía Universidad la Católica del Perú 17:205-230, Lima (2015).

From Queshqa to Callango: A Paracas Obsidian Assemblage from the Lower Ica Valley, Peru (with Michael Glascock). Ñawpa Pacha 33(2):163-191 (2013).

Corografía y derecho: un mapa manuscrito de Pisco en el siglo XVII, Revista del Archivo General de la Nación 28: 15-44 (2013).

Interpreting the Paracas Body and Its Value in Ancient Peru. In Construction of Value in the Ancient World, edited by Gary Urton and John Papadopoulos, pp. 149-169. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (2012).

Itinerant Harvests, Alternative Harvests: Kamayuq in the Service of Khapaq and Crown. Ethnohistory 58 (3): 445-489 (Summer 2011).

‘Every Superstition Shall be Removed’?:  Picturing the Holy Trinity in the Devota Novena, 1784. In I Found It at the John Carter Brown Library. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University (August 2010).

Paracas Cultural Contexts: New Evidence from the West Bank of Callango. Andean Past 7:27-55, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2005).

Life, Death, and Ancestors (with George Lau). In Andean Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman, pp. 77-115. Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology, Malden, Massachusetts (2004).

The Body Context: Interpreting Early Nasca Decapitated Burials. Latin American Antiquity 11(4):363-386 (2000).