A Humanities Scholar with a Public Vocation
I am a globally minded art historian and political scientist invested in co-creating accessible platforms to build and debate specialized knowledge at the intersections of modern and contemporary art history, comparative religious studies, and sociopolitical analysis. My career has unfolded at the highest institutional levels of my field, where I have developed and managed impactful academic, museological, and educational initiatives with a wide range of stakeholders—from grassroots communities to board members—at both national and international levels.
As a museum worker, I have led and administered multi-year research and public outreach initiatives centered on Latin American and Caribbean modern and contemporary art. As a fellow at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), I conceived and developed the research project "Bridging the Sacred: Spiritual Streams in 20th-Century Latin American and Caribbean Art, 1920–1970," supporting the programming of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America. At the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), I served as the Caribbean Cultural Institute’s inaugural fellow, undertaking the collection study "Vessels of Myth: The Shamanic Paradigm in the Works of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Belkis Ayón, and Purvis Young." Earlier in my career, I held the position of Coordinator of Education and Public Engagement at the Museos de Arte y Numismática del Banco de la República de Colombia, where I oversaw a group of sixteen educators and developed specialized pedagogical approaches to the collection. My work has reached thousands of engaged audiences through publications, interviews, conferences, collection exhibition and development, and community outreach.
As a scholar and educator, I have developed innovative research projects through wide-ranging institutional partnerships, bringing visibility to the work of women, queer, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic artists. During my doctoral studies at Columbia University, I focused on the creative and spiritual work of artists from Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, and California, resulting in my dissertation "Lucerna Extincta: Spiritual Promiscuities in Performance and Installation Art, 1970s–80s." As a master’s student and Fulbright Scholar at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, I positioned the work of artists from the San Andrés and Providencia Caribbean archipelago within a broader regional perspective. Training under the aegis of leading professors Kellie E. Jones and Edward J. Sullivan, I published 27 essays and co-organized 18 convenings in English and Spanish, securing institutional and financial support from research institutes, universities, libraries, galleries, cultural centers, and individual donors. I also hold a double BA in History and Political Science from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.
I am currently co-designing and co-developing exploratory, public-facing platforms to share scholarly and artistic knowledge in the humanities alongside specialized and non-specialized audiences. I authored and co-produced the episode “El diablo no está invitado” for the iHeartMedia award–winning podcast Radio Ambulante, which recounts Colombia’s Primer Congreso Mundial de Brujería and has garnered over 185,000 streams since 2022. Most recently, I conceived and co-directed the conference "Conjuro: conversaciones sobre arte, espiritualidades y saberes alternativos," which contributed to the two-day popular fair "Brujería: espiritualidades no hegemónicas" at the Claustro San Ignacio-Comfama in Medellín. The event established a nationwide conversation in Colombia on the importance of alternative spiritualities as catalysts for creativity and sociopolitical resistance, engaging close to 6,000 in-person participants and reaching an estimated 10 million people through a coordinated media communications strategy.
Image courtesy of Corporación Fernando González – Otraparte / Cristian Ángel.