Alexis Belis

Position
Ph.D., 2015
Role
Classical
Bio/Description

Profile

Alexis Belis is Associate Curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She specializes in Greek art, but her research interests extend to various cultures throughout the ancient world. She recently co-curated exhibitions on Cycladic Art and a Giant Boxer from Mont’e Prama, Sardinia. Before joining the Met, she was Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where she organized the exhibition Roman Mosaics across the Empire. The exhibition, which was on view at the Getty Villa from 2016–2018, highlighted mosaics from the Getty’s collection, focusing not only on the ancient context of the objects, but also on their modern discovery and excavation. She has worked on several archaeological field projects in Cyprus and Greece, including a Greek architecture project in ancient Corinth and the excavation of an altar of Zeus on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia. She has published on such varied subjects as Greek religion and mountaintop sanctuaries, Roman mosaics, bronze statuettes from Anatolia, and the Urartian origins of the so-called Parthian shot.

Alexis’s current projects at the Met include the reinstallation of the museum’s extensive collection of ancient art from Cyprus, researching a collection of Cycladic art on loan from Greece, and organizing the exhibition Across Wine-Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece, which will open in December 2026. She is also responsible for the Greek and Roman Historic Plaster Casts Collection.

Selected Publications

“The Iconography of the Eagle on the Stag in Bronze Votive Statuettes from Roman Anatolia,” Antike Kunst 67 (2024) 30–51.

Entries in the Leonard N. Stern Collection of Cycladic Art on loan from the Hellenic Republic (online publication, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2024).

“Modern Antiquity: The Enduring Art of Mosaics,” in Cameron Welch. Mosaics (Radius Books, Santa Fe 2024) 5–19.

The Giants of Mont’e Prama,” Perspectives (web publication, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2023).

Argaios: A Bronze Age Mountain-God in Greco-Roman Anatolia,” in: Annick Payne, Šárka Velhartická, and Jorit Wintjes (eds.), Beyond All Boundaries. Anatolia in the First Millennium BC. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 295 (2021) 71–101.

The Ancient Olympics and Other Athletic Games,” Perspectives (web publication, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2021).

An Urartian Belt in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Origins of the Parthian Shot,” Getty Research Journal 12 (2020) 195–204.

Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016).