Cristina E. Pardo Porto is an interdisciplinary scholar of Latinx and Latin American art and visual culture. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is currently an assistant professor at Syracuse University. Pardo Porto was the 2023–24 research fellow at the Syracuse University Humanities Center and has taught at the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as at Hunter, Lehman, and Queens colleges, CUNY. Pardo Porto’s research explores the intersections of historical archives, race, gender, migration, and the environment, focusing on visuality and coloniality across the hemispheric Americas—particularly in relation to diasporic networks in Central America and the Caribbean. Her current book project offers a decolonial history of photography from the perspective of the Latinx diaspora, foregrounding the medium’s entanglement with colonial regimes of visibility and displacement. It interrogates photographic processes, archival materials, and visual artifacts to trace alternative genealogies of photographic practice, emphasizing how contemporary artists mobilize the medium to contest dominant narratives and articulate counter-histories of racial and Indigenous justice and cultural erasure in the Americas. Recent curatorial projects include the exhibition Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum at the Syracuse University Art Museum (Jan. 21–May 10, 2025). Pardo Porto is the coeditor of Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production (University of Florida Press, forthcoming 2025) and of two special issues of the journal Istmo, both titled Photography in, on, and from Central America. Her scholarly work includes published and forthcoming articles in Art Journal, Hispanic Review, MLN, and Romance Quarterly, among others.

Tuesday, October 21, 12:15 pm