Faculty Profile

Luisa Fernanda Arrieta received her Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on national museums as stages for the performative embodiment of the state and as tools for the construction of national identities. She participated in the Conference Visualizing Blackness in Latin America, 16^th-19^th century with a paper titled Painting the Ideal Citizen: Blackness and Nation-building in Colombia’s National Museum, 1880-1887. Her research appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of the Journal for Latin American Cultural Studies. Luisa Arrieta was one of the recipients of the Latino Museums Studies Program fellowships hosted by the Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington D.C in Summer 2018.  There, she connected her work on the representation of Afro-Colombians in Colombia’s national museums with the representation of Latino/as in the U.S. at the Smithsonian. She continued her work with the Smithsonian Latino Center as a curator for the Molina Family Latino Gallery’s digital and contemporary exhibit. In 2019 she was a recipient of the HWW Public Humanities fellowship. Currently she is a Research Fellow at Greenhouse Studios, the center for Digital Humanities projects at the University of Connecticut where she is involved in several projects that use digital strategies and comprehensive historical research to develop tools for inclusion and representation.