Florencia San Martín is an assistant professor of art history at Lehigh University, where she teaches and writes about global contemporary art, art and culture in the Americas, and the history of photography.
Her monograph Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished (forthcoming with Duke University Press in July 2026) analyzes the work of the prominent Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity, which obscures the violence of colonization and globalization. Instead, the book argues that Jaar’s work represents decolonial time, exposing the limits of the violent systems we oppose but inhabit. Understanding decolonial temporality through the concepts of mourning, accountability, and failure, the book further reframes the discussion of photography and the ethics of representation in Jaar’s work by revealing the crucial roles of human rights, radical poetry, transnational solidarities, investigative journalism, and critical discourses on hope across the artist’s five-decade career, reimagining art history by offering a refreshing paradigm from which to think about global contemporary art today. Including a foreword by German civil rights attorney and founder, as well as the general secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, this book received a 2025 Millard Meiss Publication Fund from the College Art Association.
Prof. San Martín 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). She is also editor of Todavía somos el Tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe (2025), the catalogue accompanying the homonymous art exhibition at Chile's National Center of Contemporary Art, which she co-curated in 2023 through a commission by the Chilean government. Her articles, book chapters, and book reviews have been published in venues such as ASAP/J; Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture; TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World; Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH); Illapa Mana Tukukuq; Poiésis; Anales de Literatura Chilena; Iberoamericana Vervuert; and Wiley Blackwell. In turn, she has been invited to speak at numerous museums and institutions, including the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, the Free University in Berlin, and the Allentown Art Museum, where she serves in the Collections Committee.
Prof. San Martín’s research has been supported by institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the College Art Association, Lehigh University, Rutgers University's Center of Cultural Studies and School of Graduate Studies, and California State University, San Bernardino. In 2025, she was named to a Frank Hook Assistant Professorship for academic years 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 at Lehigh University.
Originally from Santiago, Chile, Prof. San Martín holds a PhD and MA in Art History from Rutgers University, an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, and a BFA in Studio Art from Catholic University in Chile.