ALAA Triennial Conference
The 7th ALAA Triennial Conference will take place in Seattle, Washington, October 8-11, 2026.
The ALAA Triennial is free to attend with prior registration.
Find more information here.
Congratulations to the 7th ALAA Triennial Graduate Student Travel Grant Recipients!
We are thrilled to announce the six recipients of the ALAA Triennial Graduate Student Travel Grant. This award supports travel to ALAA’s upcoming conference at the University of Washington, Seattle, from October 8-11, 2026. We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of ALAA Triennial Keynote Speaker Ananda Cohen-Aponte, who has redirected her honorarium to support student travel to the conference. Her contribution meaningfully broadens access to professional opportunities for emerging scholars and strengthens the future of the field. Congratulations to all of the recipients!
María Carrillo Marquina (Tulane University) is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Art History and Latin American Studies program at Tulane University, specializing in early modern Latin American art, with a particular focus in Afro-Latino artistic and religious expressions in colonial Mexico and Guatemala. Her dissertation, “Sculpting Identity: The Material Worlds of Colonial Afro-Latin American Confraternities” considers Afro-Latin Americans as custodians and makers of Catholic visual and material culture. The object corpus consists of Black sodalities’ sculptures, paintings, and liturgical goods that survive alongside an, at times, sparse archival record. This work is supported by the 2025-2026 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, the John Carter Brown, and the W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library.
Estefanía Vallejo Santiago (Florida State University) is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Florida State University. Her research examines Puerto Rican muralism, Caribbean visual culture, and Creole architecture through decolonial methodologies and critical race theory. She studies how artists use local aesthetics, public space, and collective memory to challenge colonial violence, reclaim Blackness, and strengthen community across the Caribbean and its diaspora. Growing up in the U.S. Deep South informs her attention to place, migration, and cultural belonging. Alongside her scholarship, she maintains a studio practice grounded in memory and as an educator she approaches teaching as a shared process of inquiry and unlearning.
Gisela Urday Larrea (UNMSM) is a visual artist, independent curator, and master's candidate in Art History at UNMSM. Her career spans contemporary art, community engagement, and academia. She founded Galería Extramuros in Lima, the Festival de Artes Visuales, and the Mar de Imágenes Competitions in Barranca. As former president of the Asociación de Curadores del Perú, she launched the Concurso Nacional de Curaduría LLAMA. Founder and current director of Arte Extramuros, a Peruvian visual arts organization, she curates projects that encourage dialogue among urban, rural, and ancestral visual expressions, fostering horizontal exchange between local creators and national and international platforms.
Doyun Kim (University of Michigan) is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish and Latin American art history at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on the visual and material culture of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with a particular interest in the material and ecological agency of objects within transoceanic contexts. Her dissertation focuses on how water shaped artistic production and cultural imaginaries of different colonial subjects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico City, which was characterized by the precarious tension between water’s volatile excessivity—chronic flooding due to its lacustrine environment—and managed scarcity—through the drainage project called Desagüe.
Khei Torres-Spicer (UCLA) is a doctoral student in Art History at UCLA specializing in colonial Latin American art and architecture. Their work explores sacred space, material culture, Indigenous histories, and the built environment, with a particular interest in how architecture carries memory, power, and cultural inheritance across time.
Maya Wilson-Sánchez (Columbia University) is an Andean curator, art historian, and PhD Candidate at Columbia University. They have served in research and curatorial positions at various museums in Canada and taught undergraduate and graduate courses at OCAD University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. The 2020 recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators and a 2021 participant at the Tate Intensive in London, UK, Wilson-Sánchez most recently served as one of the main curators for Toronto’s Year of Public Art, curating the 2021-2022 exhibition series I am Land, and the 2022-2023 show Replicas and Reunions: Ancient and Contemporary Ceramics from Ecuador at the Gardiner Museum.
2026 Award Winners Announced
ALAA’s annual awards program recognizes excellence in Latinx and Latin American art scholarship. Awards are announced each year at the ALAA Business Meeting, held at the College Art Association Annual Conference. All winners are acknowledged in the ALAA newsletter and receive a monetary prize.
Click here for all our awards and winners.
Our ALAA Graduate Student Travel Award 2026 WINNERS:
Brandon Agosto, PhD candidate, Art and Architecture of the Americas until 1550, Department of Art History & Archaeology Columbia University
Liam Maher, PhD candidate, 20th and 21st Century Latin American & Latinx Art, Temple University, Tyler School of Art & Architecture, Temple University
About Us
The Association for Latin American Art is a non-profit organization dedicated to the study of the art of Latin America. Established in 1979, and officially recognized as an affiliated society of the College Art Association in 1997, it aims to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, criticism, and teaching in the art and architectural history of Latin America.
For more information visit our About Us page.
Our Members
The Association for Latin American Art has over four hundred members from universities, museums, and foundations in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Panama, Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Its members are currently conducting research in all major time periods and geographic regions of Latin America. Membership benefits include access to the association listserve, a member directory, semiannual newsletters, and networking opportunities at the College Art Association Annual Conference and the ALAA Triennial Conference.
Get Insider Updates__________Receive Our Newsletters__________Become Part of Our Community __________Join the Triennal Conference__________Engage in Networking Opportunities__________Attend Events__________Access Our Resources__________Promote Your Publications and Events__________
Get Insider Updates__________Receive Our Newsletters__________Become Part of Our Community __________Join the Triennal Conference__________Engage in Networking Opportunities__________Attend Events__________Access Our Resources__________Promote Your Publications and Events__________
