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Rocío Aranda-Alvarado was born in Santiago de Chile. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her dissertation was a study of modernist movements in Harlem and Havana between 1925 and 1945. She is currently Senior Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York City, where she is working on A Brief History of (Some) Things, an exhibition exploring the persistence of Mesoamerican and Indigenous Caribbean imagery in contemporary art. She recently organized Presente! The Young Lords in New York, and Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion, both of which were nominated among the best exhibitions for 2015 and 2016 by numerous publications. Ms. Aranda-Alvarado is currently working on the museum’s upcoming La Bienal 2018 El Museo’s biennial of emerging artists.
Ms. Aranda-Alvarado is currently on the faculty of the Art and Art History Department at The City College of New York, where she is teaching a course on Contemporary U.S. Latinx Art and has taught courses in Modern and Contemporary Latin American art. Ms. Aranda-Alvarado has been invited to speak at the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Initial Public Offerings program, the Americas Society and at various colleges and universities both here and abroad. Her writing has appeared in several publications including catalogue essays for the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), and El Museo del Barrio, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Nexus, Review, the journal of the Americas Society, NYFA Quarterly, BOMB and American Art.
Also discussed during the interview was the Beatriz Santiago Munoz exhibition.