Forgione

A memorial service was held Saturday morning in Homewood's Glass Pavilion for Nancy Forgione, 54, a Johns Hopkins alumna and visiting assistant professor in the Krieger School's History of Art Department who also taught in the MLA program. She died Dec. 3, a day after being hospitalized with what was presumptively diagnosed as a meningococcal infection.

Writing to inform faculty, staff and students of her death, Krieger School Dean Adam Falk described Forgione as "an active and highly regarded scholar, and a well-liked and admired member of the Department of the History of Art. More than that," he wrote, "she was, as a colleague of mine commented, the kind of person who could make your day better with just a quick conversation while passing you in the hallway."

After graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1974 with a degree in humanistic studies, Forgione received a master's degree in library science from the University of Maryland, College Park, and worked at the Maryland Institute College of Art for five years as a cataloger and research librarian. In 1993 she received a doctorate in art history from Johns Hopkins, writing her thesis on the French artist Edouard Vuillard. In addition to teaching at Hopkins, Loyola College, MICA and Goucher College, she taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg when her husband, Michael Hill, was The Baltimore Sun bureau chief in that city.

She returned to Hopkins in 1998 and for a number of years taught undergraduate courses in 19th-century art and abstract expressionism and part of the survey course Introduction to the History of European Art. For the graduate MLA program, she first taught Abstract Expressionism in Contemporary Art and then created courses titled the Idea of Home and the History and Art of Walking. In June 2007, she was to have led a Johns Hopkins Alumni study tour to Provence and the Cote d'Azur.

"Nancy delighted in the interdisciplinary approach to education," said Melissa Hilbish, associate MLA program chair. "Her walking class grew out of her own passion for walking and the passion for journey on many levels. In class, she spoke often about her husband and their travels, a brilliant approach that is the hallmark of the MLA program, bringing various aspects of a topic together in order to view it in a new way. She was a wonderful, extraordinary, very lively teacher. Students were really drawn to her classes."

Survivors include her husband, whom she met when they were both undergraduates at Hopkins, and two sons, Albert Michael Hill Jr., a senior at Wesleyan University, and Owen Forgione Hill, a freshman at Brown University.

Memorial contributions may be made to the History of Art Department at Johns Hopkins, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218, or to the Ingenuity Project, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, 1400 W. Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore, MD 21209.

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