Florencia San Martín is an art historian who teaches and writes about contemporary art and culture in the Americas, decolonial methodologies, and theories on photography, memory, and gender.
She is co-editor of the volumes The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (Routledge, 2023); Dismantling the Nation: Contemporary Art in Chile (Amherst College Press, 2023); and the special issue “Decolonizing Contemporary Latin American Art” (Arts/MDPI, 2019). Her essays, book chapters, and book reviews have also appeared in venues including ASAP/J; Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; TRANSMODERNITY
Prof. San Martín’s research has been supported by institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; and the universities of Lehigh, Rutgers, and California State. She has participated in numerous conferences in the United States and abroad, and has been invited to speak at venues including the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín, and Catholic University in Chile. In addition to her scholarly work, Florencia is an active art critic and curator. She frequently writes for Art Nexus, a leading magazine on Latin American art, and more recently she curated Todavía somos el tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe, an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup at the National Center of Contemporary Art in Santiago commissioned by the Chilean government.
Prof. San Martín holds a PhD and MA in Art History from Rutgers University, a MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, and a BFA in Studio Art from Catholic University in Chile. Before coming to Lehigh, she was Assistant Professor of Art History and Global Cultures at California State University, San Bernardino, and while completing her PhD she taught art history courses at the School of Visual Arts and CSI/CUNY in New York.