An international workshop on the Cult Statue of a Goddess was held at the Getty Villa on May 9, 2007. Sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Museum, it brought together distinguished speakers from Italy, New Zealand, and the United States as well as observers from the Sicilian Regional Ministry of Culture and Environmental Heritage, the Archaeological Institute of America, and colleagues from across the Getty. The topics addressed comprise pseudo-acrolithic sculpture in Archaic and Classical Greece, art-historical observations about the Cult Statue, petrographic and micropalaeontological data about the statue, survey of soil residues from the statue, and pollen analysis of those soil residues.

The research undertaken and the information provided by this group will help better to determine the Cult Statue's ancient origins. The results of this workshop were a part of the Getty Museum's final stages of research before the statue was sent to Italy in 2011.