Education
Ph.D. Art History, University of New Mexico, 2013
B.A. Art History, California State University Fullerton, 1999
A.A. Art, Southwestern Community College, 1995
Biography
Theresa Avila is of Mexican and East Indian descent. Born in El Centro, CA, I grew up surrounded by the fields of the Imperial Valley, which are part of the Californian food belt.
I hold an Associate Degree in Art and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico with a focus on Latin American and Latina/o/x/e Art. Currently, I work as an Associate Professor of non-Western Art History at California State University, Channel Islands, which has brought me back to the rural regions of California’s food belt.
As a scholar and curator my work focuses on the intersections between the visual and political, on a local and global scale. Living, studying, and working in California, New Mexico, and Arizona my work benefits from focused experiences within the history, practices, and systems of the U.S. Southwest. More broadly, I interrogate the impact of settler colonialism, nation-building, and systems of differentiation from the perspective of social justice struggles and civil rights protest as they relate to contemporary communities and issues.
Topics of focus include the visual and materials culture of Mexican, Chicana/o/x/e, and Latina/o/x/e communites; portraiture; landscapes; visual narratives of war; national-building and visual culture; representation within Early Modern Atlantic ethnographic visual and material culture; and digital counter storytelling.
Projects currently in development are an edited volume on landscapes of the Americas, a book on the Taller de Grafica Popular and their portfolio on the Mexican Revolution, and a Digital Art History Project on U.S. National Parks ephemera and travel albums.
I firmly believe we must activate art in meaningful ways, and I am dedicated to community oriented projects that engage art as a tool for meaningful and equitable change.
Representative Courses Taught
- ARTH 101 Introduction to Art
- ARTH 333 History of Chicana/o/x/e Art & Culture
- ARTH 201 Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
- ARTH 355 Transatlantic Baroque Art
- ARTH 356 Art of Latin America, 1500 -1800
- ARTH 371 Modern & Contemporary Latin American Arts
- ARTH 360 Introduction to Digital Art History
- ARTH 460 Advanced Topics in Digital Art History
- ARTH 400 Advanced Topics in Art History
- ARTH 300 Art History Tools and Methods
Scholarship
Keywords
art, art history, visual culture, political, nation-building, citizenship, social justice, civil rights, protest, data and digital art history, U.S. national parks