James Trilling, was trained at Harvard University, specializing in Byzantine art. After completing his Ph.D. in Fine Arts in 1980, he served as Curator of Old World Textiles at The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., where he catalogued the Museum’s holdings in Late Roman textiles and 17th and 18th century Greek Island embroideries. Since then, he has continued his studies in Byzantine art and culture, while at the same time pioneering the rediscovery of ornament after its long exile under modernism. His book The Language of Ornament (2001), presents ornament as a human universal, from the Paleolithic era of naturalism, through the Neolithic fascination with abstract form, to the proliferation of styles and techniques during the last 4000 years. Ornament: a Modern Perspective (2003) explores the vexed relation of ornament and modernism, showing how the conflict is rooted not only in the mechanization of ornament during and after the Industrial Revolution, but also in the scientific and social thought of the 18th century.

Trilling has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study and Brown University, and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Vienna. In the spring of 2006 he will be a Visiting Professor of Art History at Amherst College. He has lectured at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Villa Spelman in Florence, Dumbarton Oaks, Brown University, the Japan Society, the Institute for the Study of Classical Architecture, the Bard Graduate Center for the Study of Decorative Art, the Worcester Museum of Art, and the Newport Museum of Art.