Sharon E. J. Gerstel is Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. An art historian and archaeologist, her research focuses on the late Byzantine village and on the intersections of art and ritual. She is author of Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary (1999) and Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology and Ethnography (2015). She has edited A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium (with J. Lauffenburger, 2001), Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, 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 Robert S. Nelson, 2010), Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese (Washington, DC, 2013), and Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (forthcoming 2016).