PARTICIPANTS’ BIOS * SEMBLANZAS

Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís es profesor-investigador de tiempo completo en el Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad Iberoamericana. Doctor en Filosofía Moral y Política por la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Sus principales líneas de investigación son ética aplicada, filosofía moral, filosofía política, filosofía de la historia y estudios culturales. Ha publicado los siguientes libros: Límites de la experiencia histórica. Ontología y epistemología de la historia en Wilhem Dilthey (Artificium: México, 2010), La república de la melancolía. Política y subjetividad en el Barroco (La Cebra: Buenos Aires, 2015), El carnicero y el cirujano. Figuraciones del archivo mexicano (Universidad Iberoamericana, de próxima aparición) y está en proceso de edición Filosofía Política. Arqueología de un saber indisciplinado.

José Luis Barrios Lara, filósofo e historiador del arte, es profesor investigador de tiempo completo de la Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México, profesor en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Curador asociado del Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MuAC). Tiene publicado nueve libros y más de cincuenta artículos en revistas especializadas de arte y crítica cultural. Sus últimos libros son: Lengua herida y crítica del presente, México: Fractal/Univerisdad Iberoamericana, 2016; Máquinas, dispositivos y agenciamientos, arte, afecto y representación, México, Universidad Iberoamericana, 2015, Melanie Smith. Fordlandia, México: Ramón Reverte, 2014.

Karen Cordero Reiman is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Theory and Historiography, and Museum Studies in the Art History Department at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She is also an independent curator and founding member of Curare, a Critical Space for the Arts. She has served on the faculty at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and on the academic councils of the Museo Nacional de Arte and the Museo Universtario de Arte Contemporáneo. Her recent exhibitions and related publications include Mónica Mayer: Si tiene dudas, pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva / When in doubt… ask: a retrocollective exhibit at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in 2016, as well as Construyendo Tamayo, 1922-1937 at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in 2013. She has curated, published, and lectured extensively on Mexican modern art, contemporary feminist art, and constructions of gender, body, and sexuality in Mexican art.

Robin Greeley is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art with particular emphasis on Mexico, and has published widely on the relationship between art and politics.
Michael Orwicz is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in visual culture and human rights, and has published on the role of photography in human rights. He has also published on theories of nationalism and representation, Marxism and the New Left, and the social history of art.
Founding members of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project, Dr. Orwicz and Dr. Greeley are engaged in analyzing policies and practices of aesthetic memorialization in symbolic reparations for victims of human rights violations in the Americas. They have co-written technical opinions for the United Nations and various NGOs and state entities in the Americas, and will soon submit the SRRP “Guidelines on the Use of Art in Symbolic Reparations,” to the Inter-American Commission on HumanRights.

Geoffrey Kantaris is Reader in Latin American Culture at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the MPhil in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures. He specializes in modern Latin American film and literature, with particular interests in urban film (Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil), women’s writing, popular culture, and the cultures of globalization. He has written many articles and book chapters in these areas. His most recent book is a co-edited volume on Latin American Popular Culture (2013) with Rory O’Bryen.

Adriana Ortega Orozco holds a PhD in History by the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine of the Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her thesis is entitled "Exhibitions of Mexican art in the transnational space: circulations, mediations and receptions (1938-1952-2000)". Her main publications deal with the history of Mexican art in the first half of the twentieth century, the reception of the First World War by Mexican elites, and Mexican cinema. Adriana contributed as an author in the Catálogo razonado de las colecciones del Museo Nacional de Arte, Siglo XX (2013). She was a Research Associate at the History Section at MIT in 2015 and is a member of the network “Transatlantic circulations of knowledges and practices” in the research laboratory AmeRIS at Paris. She has furthermore worked in several diplomatic missions in Paris and for the Directorate of Education of the OECD.

Erica Segre is Lecturer in Latin American Studies and a senior Fellow of Trinity College. She teaches in the Spanish and Portuguese Department as well as the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in nineteenth-century Latin-American literature and thought, and twentieth-century and contemporary visual culture (photography, art and film). She has lectured and published extensively in these areas in Britain and abroad and has organized international symposia, film seasons and curated exhibitions. Her book Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture was published in 2007 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books).  She is the contributing editor of Ghosts of the Revolution in Mexican Literature and Visual Culture: Revisitations in Modern and Contemporary Creative Media (Oxford/New York, 2013). She is the editor of México Noir: Rethinking the Dark in Contemporary Writing and Visual Culture (art, film,photography) (forthcoming in 2017). She is completing a book on interdisciplinarity and visual culture: Indisciplinarios! – The Arts of Indiscipline in Mexico: Poetics of Indeterminacy in Visual Culture and Literature. Essays on Interdisciplinary Practice in Creative Media from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First century.

Arturo Ortiz Struck is a visual artist and architect and has an MA in the History and Theory of Knowledge from UNAM. Currently he teaches at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of theUniversidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City while also leading Taller Territorial, a research centre on architecture, art, and urbanism (www.tallerterritorial.com). He was member of the National System of Art Creators (FONCA) between 2007 and 2014, and has also taught in the Masters’ Programme in Urban Design at Taubman College, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture, including the Venice (2012) and Sao Paulo (2013) Architectural Biennials. He was also lead editor of the journal Ensable (2012-2014) and has given workshops and presentations in major universities and cultural venues in Mexico and abroad. Ortiz Struck won the National Journalism Award "Faces of Discrimination" for his article "From architecture, discrimination" (Nexos, April 2012).

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge and Teaching Associate at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. She has published on historical, political and aesthetic topics, including Walter Benjamin’s aesthetics, Latin American literature and intellectual history, the politics of aesthetics, neo-avant-garde art, performance and the role of religion in contemporary art. She recently co-edited the volume Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America (IB Tauris, 2016, with Sophie Halart).