Thomas Ruggio, MFA

Thomas Ruggio is an artist, art history scholar, curator, author, and director of the Visual Arts Program at Iona University. He has been teaching at the college level for over 20 years. Professor Ruggio received an MFA from Queens College, CUNY, and also studied at the New York Studio School.

As an artist, Professor Ruggio's artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Mexico, Italy, Germany, and South Korea, some of which are included in American and European public and private collections. In 2011, he founded the Studio Borgo art program in Lucca, Italy, for which he served as director until 2019. The focus of the program was drawing and painting techniques and the art history of the Tuscan region.

As a scholar, Professor Ruggio has focused on 16th - 17th-century European painting and has curated exhibitions such as Peter Paul Rubens and the Flemish 17th Century and Cesare Dandini’s Holy Family with the Infant St. John: A Rediscovered Florentine Baroque Masterpiece. Professor Ruggio has written exhibition catalogs that are included in collections such as the Rubenianum in Antwerp, Belgium, the Uffizi Library (Biblioteca degli Uffizi) in Florence, Italy, and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His first book, Finding Dandini, was published in 2024.