Angela Pastorelli-Sosa

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa is Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on conceptual and mixed media practices that engage colonial legacies, histories of migration, and the mutability of identity. Her dissertation, “X Marks the Spot: Latinx Artists Mapping Space,” focuses on four Latinx-identifying artists whose works consider historical and cultural material objects as entry points for linking overdetermined constructions of geographies to essentialized notions of identity. The four artists, Enrique Chagoya, Sandy Rodriguez, Firelei Báez, and Juan Sánchez, reconfigure normative representations of space to subvert their discursive power and explore how space continues to be contested via racialized, gendered bodies. This project reads its objects of study as alternative spatial practices that address diasporic conditions and map futures where spaces and identities are no longer subject to discipline and control. In short, it analyzes how aesthetic engagements with multiple iterations of space become the active grounds for generative possibility. Angela is a 2022 recipient of the Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. She holds a BA in Art History from Williams College and an MA from the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley.