Ileana Chinnici is an Italian historian of astronomy, book author, and biographer, whose biography of Angelo Secchi won the 2021 Osterbrock Book Prize of the American Astronomical Society.
[1][2] Chinnici earned a degree in physics in 1992 from the University of Palermo with a dissertation concerning Italian astronomer Pietro Tacchini, supervised by Giorgia Foderà.
After working as a secondary school teacher, and a visiting position at the Paris Observatory, she joined the Palermo Astronomical Observatory as a research fellow in 1995, and became curator of the observatory's museum of astronomy in 1996.
Since 2004 she has been a research astronomer at the observatory, in charge of museum activities.
[3] She has also been an adjunct astronomer with the Vatican Observatory since approximately 2009.