Luise Malmaceda

Luise Malmaceda is a Brazilian scholar and curator specializing in contemporary Latin American visual culture. A PhD candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, her scholarship explores artistic practices as collective phenomena and the relationship between culture and political imagination in Latin America since the 1960s. She holds an M.A. in Aesthetics and Art History from the University of São Paulo and a B.A. in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Her dissertation, Memories of Dispute: Insurgent Archives and Political Imagination in Latin America, examines archival initiatives that construct a visual repertoire of the aspirations of contemporary social movements in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. She argues that these archives are not merely records of activism but vital forces within ongoing political struggles—driven more by gestures of prefiguration than by the traditional archival role of preserving the past. Throughout her doctoral studies, she has received fellowships from the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), the Latinx Project at NYU, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Arts and Sciences Graduate Council, and the GSAS Mellon Humanities Fellowship at Columbia University. As part of her field research and specialization in the Southern Cone, she was a visiting researcher at the Department of Latin American Studies at the University of Chile (Fall 2024) and the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (Spring 2025), where she is currently participating in the Study Group in Art, Culture, and Politics in Recent Argentina. In Fall 2025, she will be a research fellow at The Center for Documentation and Research on Left-Wing Culture (CeDInCI) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Before joining Columbia, Luise worked as an art curator and researcher in Brazil, contributing to curatorial, educational, and research projects in institutions such as MAC-USP, Tomie Ohtake Institute, Iberê Camargo Foundation, Vera Chaves Barcellos Foundation, and MACRS. During her Master's, she was a member of the Study Group in Conceptual Art and Conceptualisms in Museums (GEACC) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP), assisting in publications and public programs, including the book Terra Brasilis: arte brasileira no acervo conceitual do MAC-USP (2019). As an Associate Curator at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, she contributed to the organization of over 30 exhibitions and catalogs of modern and contemporary art. Notable projects include Yoko Ono: O céu ainda é azul, você sabia? (2017), Julio Le Parc: Da forma à ação (2018), Alucinações parciais: Exposição-escola com obras-primas modernas do Brasil e do Centre Georges Pompidou (2018), and Aprendendo com Miguel Bakun: Subtropical (2019). More recently, she curated Playing with Lyz Parayzo (Sarah Crown Gallery, New York, 2023), Matheus de Simone: Shangrilá (Gruta, São Paulo, 2023), and Caio Reisewitz: Écoute les pierres (Pinel Art Contemporain, Paris, 2022).

Her writings have been featured in catalogs and Brazilian art magazines such as Select, Bravo!, and Harper's Bazaar, where she served as the art editor in 2015. She is also co-author of the catalog AI-5 50 anos: Ainda não terminou de acabar (2019), selected as one of the best art books of the year by The New York Times and recipient of the Jabuti Literary Award in 2020.

Luise is currently co-coordinating Counter-Memories: Dismantling the Legacies of Repression in Latin America, a public humanities project documenting anti-monument initiatives, alternative archives, and visual arts projects that engage with the legacy of military regimes in the region. The website is supported by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Recent events organized:

The Eighth Annual Symposium of Latin American Art

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), 2024.

Simposio Internacional La Sobrevida de las Dictaduras 

LAIC, 2023.

Workshop My House Became an Archive

The Clemente, 2022.

Selected publications:

'Bacurau': ficção 'weird' e estética aceleracionista de expurgo colonial

Revista Philia, v. 3, n.1, 2021.

Terra Brasilis: arte brasileira no acervo conceitual do MAC-USP

MAC-USP and Annablume, 2019.

AI-50 50 anos: ainda não terminou de acabar 

Tomie Ohtake Institute, 2019.

Aprendendo com Miguel Bakun: Subtropical 

Tomie Ohtake Institute, 2019.