She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2004. Her research focuses on cross-cultural artistic interaction in the 9th-13th centuries and gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium. She recently completed her first monograph, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power (Cambridge, 2012), and her work has appeared in Muqarnas, Gesta, Ars Orientalis, and The Art Bulletin.