Education
Ph.D. Art History, University of New Mexico, 2013
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 my M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico with a focus on Latin American and Latin@x 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 Mexican visual culture and history, Chicana/o/x/e material culture and history, Latina/o/x/e art and history, 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 Mexican graphic art collective, 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 change.
Representative Courses Taught
- ART ARTH 101 Introduction to Art
- ART ARTH 333 History of Chicana/O/X Art &Culture
- ART ARTH 201 Arts Africa Oceania & Americas
- ART ARTH 355 Transatlantic Baroque Art
- ART ARTH 356 Art of Latin America, 1500 -1800
- ART ARTH 371 Modern & Contemporary Latin American Arts
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