I am a social anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar specialising in visual culture and social justice. My work is grounded on critical race and gender frameworks, and media, art history, and cultural studies perspectives from intersectional queer, critical feminist and decolonial approaches.

Focusing on Latin America and the Global South, my research and teaching engage how visual and material cultures, art and media practices, social movements, and the creative industries relate to the production and countering of inequalities as ever-changing relational fields.

I am currently researching racialization and digital and printed visual cultures in Argentina, Peru, and Colombia. I have conducted research on public art and antiracism, and on visuality, race, citizenship and mediatization in Mexico; on art for social justice colaborations between South African, Turkish, and Burundian trans and intersex activists; and on migration, cultural heritage, masculinities and embodied art practices (performance, tattoos) in the US and Mexican borderlands.

An integral interest in my work is to engage academic practices with social justice issues. This has led me to co-convene collaborative projects linking scholarly, activist, and artistic work through creative methods in different settings and with diverse collaborators in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. For example, Creaction: Creative Critical Interventions For Social Justice, a forthcoming edited volume under contract with UCL Press, and series of workshops I co-convened with Dr Natasha Tanna and Dr hakan Sandal-wilson, from the universities of York and Cambridge, at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies.

My teaching has also been guided by the interest to promote social justice awareness through critical thinking and with this focus I have taught supervisions to UG students in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Sociology on representation, visual culture, race, gender, and sexuality supervision topics, and lectured at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH).

I am a researcher in the AHRC-funded project Comics and Race in Latin America (Dr James Scorer, PI; Prof. Peter Wade, Co-I). I did a PhD at the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University London, was Associate PhD student at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, and hold degrees in Mesoamerican Studies from UNAM and in Anthropology from ENAH.

Email: maria.ortegadominguez@manchester.ac.uk 

Pronouns: she/her they/them