Speaker Series 2026
Black Visual Culture / Black Life
MARY PENA
April 23 | Time and Location TBA
MARY PENA’s work explores intersections of race and gender, visual and material culture, urban ecology, embodiment, and Afro-diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current book project examines the politics and aesthetics of spatial change in Puerto Plata, an Atlantic port city in the Dominican Republic, tracing the city’s efforts to construct an idealized architectural past while highlighting how Afro-Dominican women engage with the shifting, built environment.
Her strong interests in multimodal scholarship, critical digital humanities, and curation have led to collaborations with art and cultural spaces in the United States, curating exhibitions including Alive in their garden (2022), Un-bound (2023), and Coastal Relations: Enacting Diaspora (2024).
Her publications have appeared in Fieldsights on Cultural Anthropology, entanglements, Open Cultural Studies, and Absinthe Journal, as well as the edited volume Gender: Space. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Society of Visual Anthropology.
She was previously a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University and co-founder of the Making Sensory Ethnography working group.
Additional Speakers:
Anaiis Cisco, Reighan Gillam, Sarah Lewis, Channell Russell, Malcolm Sen, Toby Sisson, C. Rose Smith