Edith Balas is a Professor of Art History, College of Humanities & Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

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. Born June 20, 1929 in

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Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...

, she is a

Holocaust survivor Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accep ...

, art professor and

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

Biography

She is the widow of the late mathematician

Egon Balas Egon Balas (June 7, 1922 in Cluj, Romania – March 18, 2019) was an applied mathematician and a professor of industrial administration and applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research ...

, who was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Balas' main areas of interest are modern art (1890-1960), painting and sculpture, and the art of the Italian Renaissance. In 2003, she curated an exhibition at the Frick Art Museum, and several in Pittsburgh, Paris, New York and Budapest. She has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University since 1977, and is also an Adjunct Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...

. Balas is also a Holocaust survivor, having been sent to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. In ''Bird in Flight: Memoir of a Survivor and Scholar,'' Balas tells her story of facing grim situations and becoming what she describes as a “professional survivor.” Balas named her memoir “Bird in Flight” after Constantin Brâncuși’s famous sculpture of the same name. “I consider it emblematic of my life,” she said. After the war, her husband was imprisoned by the communist authorities for three years, during which Balas raised their two daughters. She received an M.A. in Philosophy from the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest ( ro, Universitatea din București), commonly known after its abbreviation UB in Romania, is a public university founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princel ...

in 1952. She then emigrated to the United States with her husband, and received an M.A. in the History of Arts from Pittsburgh University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1973.

Works

* * * * * * * * * * Edith Balas, "Michelangelo's Medici Chapel: A New Interpretation", Philadelphia, 1995

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Balas, Edith Romanian art historians Carnegie Mellon University faculty Auschwitz concentration camp survivors Living people 1929 births Romanian emigrants to the United States University of Pittsburgh alumni Writers from Cluj-Napoca Jewish American writers Jewish women writers American art historians Women art historians University of Bucharest alumni Romanian women writers

Biography

Works

See also

References