Sean Nesselrode Moncada

Sean Nesselrode Moncada (he/him) is an historian of Latin American and Latinx art, architecture and visual culture. His research focuses on visual and material modernisms, their uneven implementation across the hemisphere and their contested social and ecological dimensions. In his courses, he invites students to consider how images proliferate and behave in the world, encouraging an expanded view of what constitutes artistic production and who merits inclusion in our received histories in this place called America.

Nesselrode Moncada is the author of Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity (University of California Press, 2023), which examines the material, spatial and theoretical development of Venezuelan modernisms through the lens of petroleum extraction and refinement. It is the recipient of the ALAA–Arvey Foundation Book Award (Association for Latin American Art), the Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book on Venezuela (Venezuelan Studies Section, Latin American Studies Association) and the Best Book Award in Visual Culture Studies (Latin American Studies Association).

He has published on subjects including the role of design in the creative and pedagogical practice of Gego, the politics of midcentury geometric and informalist abstraction in South America, the visual legacies of settler colonialism in postmodern printmaking, and materiality as a conduit for memory in contemporary art. His writings and reviews have appeared in numerous journals including Architectural Theory Review; Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte; Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas; Trópico Absoluto: Revista de crítica, pensamiento e ideas; and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Nesselrode Moncada is currently at work on a poetry anthology of the dissident artist collective El Techo de la Ballena, as well as a critical biography of the artist, printmaker and archaeologist Maruja Rolando. The latter is supported by an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.