Karla Mendez (2025) studies modern and contemporary art of the Americas with a focus on Black and Latin American women’s cultural production. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Central Florida and her M.A. in American Studies from Brown University. Her writing has appeared in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Ampersand: An American Studies Journal, and the anthology We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities. She also contributed to Black Feminism Lives!: A Summit Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the National Black Feminist Organization and served as an editor for 50 Years of Combahee.
Her research interests include the histories and representations of Black and Latin American women in visual art, performance, and poetry. She is particularly drawn to how women craft self-representations that convey their expansiveness while engaging questions of identity, gender, race, and the female body. Her current work examines depictions of religious syncretism in 20th-century Latin American and U.S. visual and performance art.