Biography

Kency Cornejo is Associate Professor of Latinx/Latin American art and expressive culture in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies at UCLA. Her research and teaching specializations include art and visual culture of Central America and its diasporas; creative interventions in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist social movements; and decolonial aesthetics and methodologies in art. Dr. Cornejo’s publications on US/Central American art can be found in various scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues, and edited volumes. Her recent book, Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America (Duke University Press, 2024), features forty artists and over eighty artworks and traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of US-funded civil wars in Central America. She is currently working on a second monograph, tentatively titled Black Isthmus: The Art and Resistance of Afro-Central America and is also co-editing an anthology titled Compton: Reflections on Art and the City. Before joining UCLA, Dr. Cornejo was a faculty member in the Art History Department at the University of New Mexico (2014-2024). Her work has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford Foundations, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award Grant, and a Mellon-funded Crossing Latinidades Research Collaboration Grant. She was born to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California.

Education

Ph.D., Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University, 2014

M.A., Latin American Art History, University of Texas at Austin, 2007

B.A., Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005

Research

Contemporary Art of Central America and its Diasporas

Chicana/o & Latinx Art

Contemporary Latin American Art

Afro-Latin American Diasporic Art

Art and Activism

Decolonial Aesthetics and Methodologies in Art

Anti-racist, Anti-colonial, Post-colonial, Decolonial thought

Publications

Cornejo, Kency. Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America Durham: Duke University Press, Dissident Acts Series, (October 2024)

Cornejo, Kency. “Central America at Self-Help Graphics: Camaraderie and Artmaking in the City of Angels” in Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking, edited by Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2023):191-223.

Cornejo, Kency. “Megawealth and its Entanglement with Art and Colonial Aesthetics” in The Strike MoMA Reader, The Strike MoMA Working Group of International Imagination of Anti-national, Anti-imperialist Feelings (IIAAF), editors (Verso Books, 2021):144-149.

Cornejo, Kency. “Sonic Healing in the Age of Border Imperialism: The Art of Guadalupe Maravilla” in Gean Moreno, editor, Guadalupe Maravilla: Portals exhibition Catalogue (Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2021):10-25.

Cornejo, Kency. “Writing Art Histories from Below: A Decolonial Guanaca-Hood Perspective” in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal (University of California Press, 2019) Vol 1 No 3 (July): 72-77.

Cornejo, Kency. “US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, 2019: 1-27

Cornejo, Kency. “Visual Counter Narratives: Central American Art on Migration and Criminalization,” in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 5 No 2 (Spring 2017); 63-82.

Cornejo, Kency. “Honduras-Artistas en Resistencia” in Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant Kester, so-editors. Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017; 79-97.

Cornejo, Kency. “Decolonial Futurisms: Ancestral Border Crossers, Time Machines, and Space Travel in Salvadoran Art,” in Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas. Hernández,Stallings, and Szupinska-Myers, eds. Riverside: UCR ARTSblock, 2017: 20-31.

Cornejo, Kency. “‘Does that come with a Hyphen? A Space?’ The Question of Central American-Americans in Latino Art and Pedagogy” in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40 no. 1 92015): 189-210.

Cornejo, Kency. “Migrants that Matter: The Intricacies of Migration in Regina José Galindo’s Performance Art” in Regina José Galindo: Bearing Witness, Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, 2015; 30-37.

Cornejo, Kency. “No Text Without Context: Habacuc Guillermo Vargas’ Exposition #1” in Art and Documentation/Sztuka i Dokumentacja 10 (2014): 53-59.

Courses

Undergraduate

• Art of Central America
• US-Central American Art
• Chicana/o & Latinx Art
• Experimental Art and Politics in Latin/x America, Post-1968

Graduate

• Decolonial Aesthetics
• Art & Border Imperialism
• Methods/Theories for Chicana/o & Latinx Art Writing
• Afro-Latin American & Afro-Latinx Art
• Art & Feminisms