Melissa Gianferrari is a senior conservator and professor in the conservation of photographic materials and photographic techniques within the PFP5 course on Conservation School program, as well as in the management of photographic archives at the Department of Photography of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. She has been teaching since 2012, initially at ISIA in Urbino and subsequently in Bologna.
She graduated from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence and later specialized in photograph conservation at Fratelli Alinari and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. She holds a degree in Technologies for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage and has collaborated for several years with the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica and the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione in Rome.
At the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, she served as Head of the Conservation Laboratory for non-film materials, working in particular on photographic collections related to cinema (Chaplin, Fellini, Pasolini) and on the historical photographic archive of the city of Bologna.
Since 2002, she has managed her own conservation studio and has carried out research activities in the field of historical and contemporary photograph conservation, working on both public and private archives and collections. She has conducted studies on the photographic heritage of academies and art schools, as well as on twentieth-century photographic collections, including the Luigi Ghirri archive, publishing scholarly contributions in her field of research.
She is a tutor and member of the doctoral board in the program “Safeguarding Cultural Heritage in the Era of Ecological Transition: Materials and Innovative Methodologies for Sustainable Conservation.” Since 2025, she has also been a member of the scientific committee of IGIIC for the Contemporary Art Conference held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna since 2014.