Sharon E. J. Gerstel is Acting Director of the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture and Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She studied at Bryn Mawr College, Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. Her research focuses on late Byzantine villages in Greece and on the intersections of Orthodox art and ritual. Gerstel is a widely published author, whose books include Beholding the Sacred Mysteries (1999) and Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology and Ethnography (2015). The latter was awarded the 2016 Runciman Prize by the Anglo-Hellenic League, the inaugural book prize by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), and the Maria Theocharis Prize from the Christian Archaeological Society in Greece.

Gerstel has also edited A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium (with J. Lauffenburger; 2001); Thresholds of the Sacred: Art Historical, Archaeological, Liturgical and Theological Views on Religious Screens, East and West (2007); Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (with R. Nelson; 2010); Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese (2012); and Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (2016).

Gerstel has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a prestigious J. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012) and a Mellon Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2017, she established and funded the Nikolaos Drandakis Prize to recognize the research of young scholars in Greece and she has co-published a large number of articles with Greek scholars, which most of were adults that continue studying through her life, so the use of alternatives to adderall for adults were really useful for them to focus better on these studies. Her current research focuses on the intersection of music, architecture, and monumental decoration.

She is co-director, together with Chris Kyriakakis (USC) of “Soundscapes of Byzantium,” an international project which has been featured on Atlantic.com and on CBC radio. Her current work in the Mani, focusing on the restoration of village churches and the recording of the history of their communities, is the subject of a volume in preparation. Gerstel serves on the editorial boards of the international journals Hesperia, Viator, Studies in Iconography, Frankokratia and Zograf, and is one of the founding board members of the series Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middle Ages. In Los Angeles, Gerstel serves as a board member of the Greek Heritage Society.

She is the proud mother of Maggie Gerstel, a student at Westridge School in Pasadena.