Ilaria Bucci specialises in archaeology of the Near East from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. Her main research interests include ancient graffiti, visual culture, especially sculptural traditions, and the preservation of cultural heritage in post-conflict zones.

She earned her BA and MA degrees in Archaeology and Ancient History from the University of Turin (Italy) and recently completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2023. Her doctoral research focussed on the pictorial and textual graffiti from Hatra in Northern Iraq (2nd-3rd century CE), where she applied an interdisciplinary approach integrating archaeology and epigraphy and placing special emphasis on topographical distribution and spatial analysis.

Ilaria has participated in several expeditions in Iran and Iraq and is the vice-director of the Hatra Statuary Salvage Project, a project for the cataloguing and restoration of the statues from Hatra in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad (CAMNES-SBAH). Before joining UrbNet as a postdoctoral fellow, she also worked as a core member of the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive Project (Yale University-Bard), a Linked Open Data initiative aimed at enhancing accessibility to the extensive archives of the Yale-French Excavations at Dura-Europos (Syria).