Current Students Doctoral Chasitie Brown, PhD candidate Chasitie Brown is a PhD Candidate. She specializes in contemporary art from Latin America and the Caribbean with a focus on Cuban art and art criticism. Her research interests include representations of race, gender, and history in contemporary Cuban art of the island and its global diaspora in Spain, with a particular focus on the Canary Islands. Chasitie is currently writing her dissertation titled “The Dormant Scar: Art and Race in Cuba in The Queloides Exhibition Series (1997–2012).” The project will provide the first monographic study of a group of exhibitions, known as Queloides, that took up one of the most silenced issues in contemporary Cuban society: anti-Black racism. Looking at a spectrum of media, from photography to paintings, she argues that the artists participating in Queloides challenged traditional representations of Blackness rooted in Afro-derived religion and folklore. Instead, they approached race from historical and social perspectives, using humor and, especially, irony to challenge racial stereotypes and dominant notions of history that excluded the Black presence. Her second project, “Transatlantic Crossings: Cuban Art and Artist Networks in Spain,” examines how Cuban artists working during the late 1990s and early 2000s reimagine and engage with the history of Spain through the perspective of Cuba. It pays particular attention to the exchanges and networks among artists, art critics, and curators from Cuba and the Canary Islands, who forged a unique affective relationship built on a shared archipelagic kinship. Recent Awards: Harrington Dissertation Fellowship, Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin (2024-2025); Twelve Month-Ittleson Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2023-2024); Goizueta Graduate Fellowship, Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) at the University of Miami (2023-2024) Catalina Cherñavvsky Sequeira Catalina Cherñavvsky Sequeira, PhD Student Catalina is a fourth-year PhD candidate. Her research is centered around experimental film, video, and performance in Argentina and Brazil during the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses specifically on transregional artistic networks, systems of circulation, and phenomenological shifts that occurred under authoritarianism. Her dissertation follows two women-led artist groups working with compact film and video formats to explore how they reclaimed and reconceptualized space through the filmic screen. Recent awards: Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Prints and Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art (2022-2023), John F. Newman Endowed Presidential Fellowship in Art History, University of Texas at Austin (2022) Pilar Dirickson Garrett Pilar Dirickson Garrett, PhD student Pilar Dirickson Garrett is a fourth-year doctoral candidate, where she specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century art and architectural histories of Latin America. Her scholarly interests include institutional and exhibition histories, histories of architectural modernism, intellectual history, material cultural studies, and politics of race, space, and the built environment. Pilar is currently conducting research for her dissertation titled “Objects of Distinction: The Making of Race, Space, and Region in Exhibitions of Brazilian Popular Art, 1930-1965.” The project investigates the emergence of Brazil’s first museums and exhibitions dedicated to the display of “popular art” – a category of material culture produced largely by self-trained and often anonymous makers from the country’s rural interiors – as they arose in the Northeast of the country through the interwar and immediate postwar periods. Offering a novel analysis of the “popular” as it relates to both Brazilian material culture and histories of built and imagined space, the project positions these constellated exhibitionary complexes as sites through which local state-makers and cultural arbiters were able to negotiate diverse understandings of racial, spatial, and regional modernity at midcentury. Embracing analytical frameworks from Black spatiality studies and new materialist theory, Pilar’s research centers the affective nature of architecture and the agency of material things to argue for the complicity of exhibitions of material culture in the production of Brazil’s racialized spatial geographies. Recent Awards: Graduate School Continuing Fellowship (2025-2026); Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art (2024-2025); Graduate School Continuing Fellowship (2024); Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) (2023). Maysa Martins, PhD student Jennifer Sales Jennifer Sales, PhD candidate Recent awards: Honorable Mention, Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art (2020-2021) Lucy Quezada Yáñez, PhD candidate Recent awards: Fulbright for Study in the U.S. (2019-2024); Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art (2021-2022); Brazil Initiation Scholarship, Brazilian Studies Association (2020) Mia Uribe Kozlovksy, PhD student Masters Angela Amaro Angela Amaro, MA student Angela Amaro is a first-year MA student studying contemporary Latin American art and queer Chicano/a/x/é art. Within these frameworks she examines performance art, brown and Chicano/a/x/é aesthetics, and the evolving discourses associated with the complexity of identity. Angela’s investigations within these perspectives set up the foundation of her master’s thesis. Angela has previously worked as a studio assistant and has interned at the Hoehn Family Galleries located in San Diego, Ca. In 2024, she received Exceptional Performance in Art History, awarded by the Department of Art, Architecture and Art History at the University of San Diego. Inés Anleu Gil Inés Anleu Gil, MA student Inés Anleu Gil is a first-year MA student focusing on iconography in contemporary Central American art. She is particularly interested in the construction and transformation of icons, and how they inform expressions of identity and nation through their varied intersections with Precolumbian imagery, Catholicism, and topography. She has worked in institutions such as Galería Extra and El Museo Ixchel del Traje Indígena in Guatemala City, and The Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Sofia D’Agostino, MA student Sofia D’Agostino is a first-year master’s student. Her research centers performance art and embodied forms of expression in post-war Brazil. In past research projects, she has explored the works of Hélio Oiticica, Adriana Varejão, and Clarissa Tossin, artists who implicate the body of the spectator to address modern conceptions of Brazilian identity. Her thesis will continue to examine how artists in Brazil respond to complex colonial histories and promote marginalized perspectives using embodiment. Recent awards: Radwan and Allen Prize in Art History (2025), Gero Family Travel Grant (2024) Leo Dulitzky, MA student Isabella Rafky, MA student Juan J. Roque Giraud Juan José Roque-Giraud, MA student Juan J. Roque-Giraud is a first-year MA student. Their research centers on contemporary art from the insular Caribbean and its diaspora, with a particular interest in materialism, ephemerality, and conceptualism. Their thesis will explore conceptual and immaterial artistic actions of Puerto Rican artists during the 1960s and 1970s. Recent Awards: Dr. Sebastián González García Award for highest academic average, intellectual aptitude, and commitment to the discipline of art history (2025); Honorable Mention for the Dean’s Award, Faculty of Humanities at UPR-RP (2025)
