Department of Spanish and Portuguese

I am a scholar, writer, and editor specializing in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean visual cultures and literatures, with a strong focus on Venezuelan experimental aesthetics, gender studies, diaspora studies, and critical theory.

My teaching and mentoring experience spans culturally immersive language courses and advanced courses on Latin American and Caribbean film, theater, literature, gender, and aesthetics, as well as experimental media and interdisciplinary arts. In language courses, I contextualize the Spanish language through tasks, experiences, visuality, and cultural knowledge, while understanding each student’s pace and relationship to the language.

My transdisciplinary research explores intersections of race, gender, media, and psychoanalysis, and is grounded in hemispheric and transmedial approaches. My academic book project, Catachrestic Images: Experiments in Venezuelan Visual Culture, reflects this commitment to examining aesthetic and political practices in precarity and crisis. Other scholarly work appears in journals such as Calle 14, Discourse, Yearbook of Comparative Literature, and LLIDS; and publishers and venues like MASP, Abra Caracas, and Ediciones Polar.

My creative, collaborative, and translation work also informs my research. I am the author poro, un tríptico (2023), an autofiction collection, and co-author of manifiesto degenerado/degenerate manifesto (2023), a manifesto for alternative literary genres. I am co-editor of the independent press flores degeneradas that operates in diaspora, and have translated works by Wayne Koestenbaum, Sol Calero, Victoria de Stefano, and others.

As a frequent contributor to exhibitions, collaborations, screenings, and curatorial projects across the Americas and Europe, I aim to bridge academic research and public humanities through events, installations, screenings, and editorial projects. With a varied background, I bring a critical, cross-disciplinary approach to my intellectual and creative work by contributing actively to scholarly communities and public cultural dialogues across languages and borders.