Diana is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. She specializes in modern to contemporary art from Latin America with an emphasis in the Andean-Amazon region. Her academic writing focuses on transnational cultural exchanges from the 1860s to the present, issues around the construction of national and cultural identities and the long-lasting perceptions and misconceptions these have ensued in the region, and extractive practices at large. Diana approaches her art historical practice in an interdisciplinary way, in dialogue with the Environmental Humanities, Cultural Anthropology, and Ecocriticism. Her dissertation research examines representations of the Amazon region in Ecuador and Peru from different perspectives –Indigenous and non- Indigenous– and the constant cultural and environmental transformations of the region during the late nineteenth century and the present. She is specifically interested in learning more about Indigenous relational ontologies represented in material culture and visual aesthetics, and historical notions of self-representation in the Amazon. She has interned at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and worked at the Institute of Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). She participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership Summer Seminar 2023, and is currently enrolled in the two-year long seminar, The Amazon basin as Connecting Borderland, 2023-2025. Before starting her Ph.D., she completed her MA in Art History at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University in 2018.
School of Arts and Sciences
