Art Historian and Curator
Photograph: Violette Bule.
Photographic images move around, materialize in different ways, serve many purposes. How do they come into being? For whom are they made? How do they reach us? What do we make of them? What do we mean when we call them “art”?
These are some of the questions that guide my work as an art historian and curator with a particular interest in photography and print culture in the Americas and Europe.
I hold an undergraduate degree from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas (Law, 1999), an M.A. from Hunter College (Art History, 2012), and a Ph.D. from New York University (Spanish and Portuguese, 2019). My work focuses on the production and circulation of photographic images, emphasizing questions of gender, mobility, and cultural exchange. My published scholarship showcases my ability to think critically about issues of cultural production from a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective. My current book project (Culture Brokers: Ethnographic Photography by European Women in Latin America) considers the production of photographic images under conditions of unequal conviviality and their transnational circulation through a wide range of print materials and exhibitions.
In 2025, I joined Leibniz Universität Hannover as a researcher under the DFG Research Unit “TransExile: Negotiations of Aesthetics and Community in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (1920-1960).” Within this collaborative group, my research project (“Mayan Fever: Aesthetic Interventions Amid the Bonampak Craze”) studies overlapping exile networks engaged in (re)conceptualizations of Indo and Afroamerican cultures in the 1940s and 50s, with close attention to how the picture press mediated debates about Mexico’s multicultural heritage.
Photograph: Peter Adamik.
My curatorial experience includes "Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press" (Americas Society, 2016), the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to the work of the Hungarian-born Mexican photographer. Among other institutional projects, I have collaborated with the Reina Sofía Museum's online portals "Rethinking Guernica" (2017) and "Front and Rearguard: Women in the Spanish Civil War" (2021).
Alongside my academic work, I collaborate with the Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna as an advisor.