Natalia Brizuela

Close-up portrait of a person with dark, curly hair and a neutral expression against a background of wooden panels.

Natalia Brizuela was the interim director of the Arts Research Center from 2018 to 2019, an ARC fellow cohort leader, and affiliated faculty member. 

A professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media at University of California, Berkeley, Brizuela teaches in both departments and is affiliated faculty in the Othering and Belonging and Institute, as well as the Center for Race and Gender. She is the director of the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator for the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. She is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory and Gender and Women’s Studies. As ARC's interim director, Brizuela led a semester-long program titled "Arts of Critique from the Global South" that explored art and critique as an embodied critical engagement with the geopolitics of injustice, destructive violences of displacement, environmental crisis, contemporary forms of dissent, protest and rearticulations of democracy. 

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Escritura, Trama Y Deseo with Diamela Eltit

Job title: 
Former ARC Director, Moderator
Bio/CV: 

Natalia Brizuela is a Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Império. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th Century photography in Brasil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, Depois da fotografia. Uma literatura fora de si (Rocco, 2014) is a study of contemporary literature in an expanded field, looking particularly at the relationship between current literary practices and photographic languages, techniques and materialities. With Jodi Roberts she has written two books, Photography at its Limits (OneEditionBooks, 2019) and The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford University Press, 2018), as part of exhibition projects they co-curated. She has also curated NO SÉ (El templo del sol), a solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires in 2015, and is currently preparing an exhibition on the work of Waldemar Cordeiro with Rachel Price.

Natalia was the Arts Research Center's interim Director for the 2018/2019 school year.

Role: 
Moderator
Affiliated Faculty
Researcher