Raino Isto is an educator, curator, researcher and art historian. Isto works transnationally at the intersection of activism, art, and public memory. They are the editor-in-chief of ARTMargins Online and also a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute in NYC. They are currently at work on a book about realism, engaged art, the global Cold War in postwar Albania. They recently curated the retrospective exhibition „Pleurad Xhafa: Irreconcilability as an Act of Love” at ZETA Contemporary Art Center, and at the moment they are working as a researcher on an editorial and exhibition project on the “Linda” organization, the first collective of women artists in post-socialist Albania. In their PhD, Isto wrote about the political valences of monumental sculpture in socialist and post-socialist Southeastern Europe. Their work has been published in Third Text, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, International Labor and Working Class History, ARTMargins, RACAR, and The Getty Research Journal. Raino also has published several catalog essays on Albanian postwar art, and worked as a consultant on a municipal public art plan for Tirana. They are a founding member of the Laboratory for Albanian Art and Culture (LACA).
