Laura Elisa Pérez, PhD
Associate Professor at University of California, Berkeley
BIOGRAPHY
Laura Elisa Pérez is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Women’s Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. Pérez received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BA/MA Joint Degree from The University of Chicago. She has served as Head of the Graduate Program in Comparative Ethnic Studies, Coordinator of the Program in Chicana/o Latina/o Studies, and Director of the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group on Gender. She is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke UP 2007). Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Decolonial Voices: Chicana/os Studies in the 21st Century (Aldama and Quiñonez 2002), Latino/as in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire (Grosfoguel et al. 2006), Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity (De la Torre and Espinosa 2006), Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (Espinosa and García 2008), Rhetorics of the Americas, 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (Baca and Villanueva 2009), and most recently in Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives (Facio and Lara 2014). Pérez curated UC Berkeley’s first Latina/o Performance Art series, co-curated Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas [The Loudmouths] (Spring 2009, 516 Gallery, Albuquerque, NM), and curated Labor+a(r)t+orio: Bay Area Latina@ Arts Now (Richmond Arts Center, CA 2011). Her most recent publication appeared in “The Inviolate Erotic in the Painting of Liliana Wilson,” in Ofrenda/Offering: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams, edited by Norma Cantú (2014) and “Writing with Crooked Lines,” was published in Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality. She recently finished a new book manuscript, “Ero-Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial” that will be published by Duke University Press in 2016. She is at work on another research project on women of color and non-violence and on an anthology of essays on the work of multi-media artist Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.
Laura’s latest book: Eros Ideologies (Duke University Press 2019)