Team

Carmen Fernández-Salvador (PhD University of Chicago) is professor of Art History at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She has published various studies on colonial art and historiography, among them “Reflections on Painting in Colonial Quito”, in The Art of Painting in Colonial Quito (Philadelphia: St. Joseph University Press, 2012); “Following in the Footsteps of Christ: Uses of the Via Crucis in Colonial Quito”, in Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition: The Senses and the Experience of God in Art (Routledge, 2019) She coauthored the book Arte colonial Quiteño: Renovado enfoque y nuevos actores. Biblioteca Básica de Quito 14 (Quito: FONSAL, 2007); with Verónica Salles-Reese, she edited the volume Autores y Actores del Mundo Colonial: Nuevos Enfoques Multidisciplinarios (Quito: USFQ, Georgetown University and CASO: 2008). During the fall semester of 2015, she was the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at Harvard University. In connection to the topic of this project she has published “Jesuit Missionary Work in the Imperial Frontier: Mapping the Amazon in Seventeenth-Century Quito”, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Philadelphia: Penn University Press, 2014) and Encuentros y desencuentros con la frontera imperial: la iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús de Quito y la misión en el Amazonas (siglo diecisiete) (Vervuert, 2018).

Maria Berbara (PhD, University of Hamburg) is a professor of art history at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She specializes in Italian and Iberian art produced between the 15th and 17th centuries, as well as in cultural history, early modern globalism, and intellectual interchange in the Atlantic world. Her current research examines the history of the Antarctic France, the global image of the Tupinamba, and the relation between art, diseases, and conversion processes across the early modern Atlantic. Her individual and joint academic projects have been supported by the Getty Foundation, Villa I Tatti, DAAD/Germany, INHA/Paris, and the Brazilian funding agencies Fapesp, Faperj, CNPq, and Capes. Together with Roberto Conduru and Vera Siqueira she coordinated the project “Unfolding Art History in Latin America”, which was funded by the Connecting Art Histories initiative in 2012, in which both the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and the Universidad de los Andes also participated.

Patricia Zalamea (PhD Rutgers University) is Associate Professor of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities between 2015 and 2021. In addition to developing the first art history undergraduate program in Colombia (2010), she is one of the founders and board members of the Colombian Chapter (CCHA) of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) and part of the steering committee of the Transregional Academy on Latin American Art of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte(2019-2022). Her fields of study include Colonial Latin American art, Global Renaissance art, the reception of Classics in a Colonial context, history of the print, and portraiture. Recent publications include a diachronic study of the portrayal of an Andean chieftain, titled “Narratives of Sacrifice in the Nuevo Reino de Granada: Doubting Sugamuxi and Muisca Conversion in a Colonial Context”in Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard U. Press, 2022); two chapters and one article on the Classical tradition as reinterpreted by humanist circles in 17th-century Lima and Cuzco, one of which appeared in Re-inventing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1300-1700 (Brill, 2020). She has also explored classicizing features in secular mural paintings of 16th-century Tunja, Colombia (Historia y Sociedad n.36, 2019).

Jens Baumgarten (Ph.D. Hamburg University) is professor of art history at the Federal University of São Paulo (Universidade Federal de São Paulo). He studied Art History and History in Hamburg and Florence. After post-doctorate fellowships in Dresden, Germany, Mexico-City and Campinas, Brazil, he established one of the first autonomous departments of Art History in Brazil. In 2010 he was visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, in 2013 at the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (2016/2017). From 2011-2016 he was coordinator of the Project “New Art Histories: Relating Ideas, Objects and Institutions in the Latin American World” and Global Baroque” in collaboration with the University Zürich, funded by the Getty Foundation, and since 2022 he is coordinator of the project “Art and Power – decolonizing Art History” in collaboration with the Museu de Arte Contemporâneo, Universidade de São Paulo (MAC- USP), Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, also funded by the Getty Foundation. He specializes in early modern art history of Latin America and Europe, Neobaroque as well as in historiography of art, visual culture, methods and theories of art in context, and most recently on questions of ecology and art.

María Patricia Ordóñez (PhD Leiden University) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at. Universidad San Francisco de Quito. In addition to her PhD from the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, she holds a Master’s degree in Archaeology from Leiden University (2014) and a Master’s degree in Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology, from Cranfield University (2011). She was Director of Research and Innovation at the National Institute of Cultural Heritage until August 2022 and was curator of the Casa del Alabado Museum from 2018-2020. Her work focuses on the formation and use of collections of human remains in the Andean area and Western Europe. She was guest curator at the National Museum of Ecuador (MUNA), at the Museo Jijón y Caamaño and Museum of World Cultures (previously Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde) in Leiden.

Natalia Lozada (PhD University College London) is an Assistant Professor in the Art History Department at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, where she teaches courses focused on the arts of the Amazon, rock painting, prehispanic and colonial art. After graduating with an MA in anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, Natalia Lozada received her PhD in world archaeology from the University College London with a specialty in prehispanic ceramics from the Orinoco and the Caribbean. Her research focuses on indigenous representations in early colonial art through the study of ethnographic sources. Recent publications include: Lozada-Mendieta, N and Carvalho, D. (2022) “En tierra de caimanes: Imaginarios geográficos, imperialismo y tropicalidad en las obras de Jules Crevaux (1883) y Jean Chaffanjon (1889)”. Historia Crítica. In press. / Lozada-Mendieta, N. and Oliver, J.R. (2022) The archaeology of the Mighty Orinoco in the 21st century: A synthesis. Oxford Handbook of South American Archaeology. In press. / Lozada-Mendieta, N., Riris, P and J.R. Oliver (2022). Beads and stamps in the Middle Orinoco: Archaeological evidence of pre-colonial interaction and exchange in the Átures Rapids. Latin American Antiquity. In press. / Arroyo-Kalin, M. Morcote-Ríos, G. Lozada-Mendieta, N. & L. Veal (2019) “Entre La Pedrera y Araracuara la arqueología del medio río Caquetá”. Revista del Museo de La Plata 4(2): 305-330./ Riris, P; J. R. Oliver and N. Lozada Mendieta (2018). “Missing the point: reevaluating the earliest lithic technology in the Middle Orinoco”, Royal Society Open Science, 5.