Marjorie S. Venit is Professor of Art History & Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She specializes in the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world with an emphasis on the Greek center and its periphery considered both geographically and temporally. Particularly interested in the intersection of cultures and ethnicities, she has excavated at Tel Anafa, Israel, and Mendes, Egypt and is the author of Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria: The Theater of the Dead and Greek Painted Pottery from Naukratis in Egyptian Museums. Her book projects have been supported by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kress Foundation, and the J.P Getty Trust. Among her other national awards are a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt, the American Association of University Women, and the American Philosophical Society.

Dr. Venit has contributed chapters or entries to the The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt, and to other collections of scholarly papers. Her articles on monumental tombs and on Greek vases and sculpture, which consider the social, religious, economic, and political context and implications of the monuments, have appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, Antike Kunst, and the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt and in other periodicals.

She served four years as President of the Washington Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and is currently its webmaster. She has delivered over fifty public lectures, many of them as a circuit lecturer for the AIA.