Research Expertise and Interest

Chicana/Latina Feminist & Queer literary, visual, performance arts; US women of color thought; decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities

Research Description

Laura Elisa Pérez is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Chair of the Latinx Research Center, an interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Women’s Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies.  Pérez received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BA/MA Joint Degree from The University of Chicago.  Pérez curated UC Berkeley’s first Latina/o Performance Art series, co-curated Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas in 2009, in Albuquerque, NM, and curated Labor+a(r)t+orio: Bay Area Latina@ Arts Now at the Richmond Arts Center, CA in 2011. Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), a work in which she theorized the concepts of decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities, and analyzed an archive of the work of more than forty visual, literary, and performance artists.  Her new book manuscript, Ero-Ideologies:  Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial is forthcoming by Duke University Press 2018.  She is at work on an anthology on the work of multi-media artist Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.