Martina Papiro studied art history, musicology and German literature in Basel, Berlin, and Florence. In 2012 she received her doctorate with a PhD dissertation on Florentine festival prints of the Seicento (Choreographie der Herrschaft. Stefano della Bellas Radierungen zu den Reiterfesten am Florentiner Hof, 1637–1661, published 2016). One of her research interests concerns the interaction between music and visual arts in the early modern period. She has been part of several interdisciplinary research projects: “European Festival Culture” (Berlin, 2006–2009), “Epistemology of Early Modern Images” (Florence, 2009–2011), and “Bowed String Instruments c. 1500” (Basel, 2011–2015). Since 2016 she has been research fellow and staff member of the Research Department of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. In addition, she is active as an author, translator, radio journalist for the Swiss national radio SRF 2 Kultur, and curator, e.g. for the exhibition “Hans Huber und das Basler Musikleben um 1900” (Basel, Museum Kleines Klingental, 2014).

Her research in the field of opera started with her MA-thesis about the portrait of the castrato Marc’Antonio Pasqualini (Rome, c. 1640), went on during her research projects in Berlin (focussed on the visuality of opera) and in Florence (due to the close link between festival culture and operatic spectacles), and is opening now to the 18th century with the development of an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project devoted to the stagecraft of opera singers.