Research Bio
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 Department of Women’s Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and of 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; and co curated the major traveling retrospective "Amalia Mesa-Bains. Archaelogy of Memory" (2023-2025), named by ARTnews as one of the defining exhibitions of 2023. 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. She is also author of Eros-Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Duke University Press 2018) in which she writes about contemporary US Latinx art. She is co-editor with Ann Marie Leimer of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision (Duke University Press 2022), and co-editor with María Esther Fernández of the exhibition catalog Amalia Mesa-Bains. Archaelogy of Memory (University of California Press and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 2023). She publishes in journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs on the decolonial and Latinx art, Latinx spirituality, Latinx critical thought and philosophy.
Research Expertise and Interest
Chicana/Latina feminist & queer literary, visual, performance arts, US women of color thought, decolonial aestetics and decolonial spiritualities
