With a dual training in art history and archaeology and in oriental history and philology (with a focus on ancient Egyptian), Dimitri Laboury devoted his doctoral thesis to La statuaire de Thoutmosis III. Essai d'interprétation d'un portrait royal dans son contexte historique (Liège, 1998). He spent most of his career as an F.R.S.-FNRS researcher, before the University of Liège created a chair for his lectures in 2023. His research focuses on the material culture of ancient Egypt, and as such, he has taken part in various archaeological missions in Egypt, at Tanis, Karnak, Amarna and the Theban Necropolis, where he has been co-director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission since 2010, which he now heads. His scientific interests focus in particular on the study of Egyptian art, from its creation in Antiquity to its recovery in the various cultures that have appropriated the Pharaonic model, including within the Western tradition. Under a Scientific Impulse Mandate from the F.R.S.-FNRS, he has initiated a vast program of research into artists in ancient Egypt and the study of their various practices, making it possible to follow individual artists or artists' hands, but also and above all to understand who these key players were in a society that invested so much in artistic production. His main scientific objective is to restore the notions of art and artists to their rightful place in the conceptual vocabulary of the discipline of Egyptology, which is the focus of his series of lectures at the Collège de France.
