Bonna D. Wescoat is the Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University, and Director of American Excavations Samothrace. A graduate of Smith College (A.B.), the Institute of Archaeology London (M.A.), and Oxford University (M.Phil., D.Phil.), she has worked extensively in the Mediterranean as an archaeologist and architectural historian. Her research interests center on architecture and sacred experience in ancient Greece, investigated through excavation, 3D digital modeling, architectural reconstruction, and experimental archaeology. The archaeological excavations she currently directs in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace investigate what the interaction of landscape, architecture, and human movement can reveal about the secret yet transformative process of initiation in the mysteria.

She has written several books on ancient Greek architecture, including Samothrace Vol. 9, The Monuments of the Eastern Hill (2017); The Temple of Athena at Assos (2012); Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium (eds. B. D. Wescoat and R. Ousterhout, 2012); Samothracian Connections; Essays in honor of James R. McCredie (eds. O. Palagia and B. D. Wescoat, 2010), and exhibition catalogues, Replicating History; Guide to the Plaster Casts on View at Emory University (1994); Syracuse, the Fairest Greek City (1989), and Poets and Heroes:  Scenes from the Trojan War (1986).

Wescoat has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Humanities Center Allen W. Clowes Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize in the History of Art, and a Marshall Scholarship to Great Britain. She currently leads a Getty-sponsored Connecting Art Histories seminar, “Beyond the Northern Aegean,” bringing together graduate students and senior scholars across regional boundaries to study common research interests.