Charlene Villaseñor Black is the inaugural Loevner Fellow and Tutor in History of Art at Worcester College and the first Professor in the Art of the Americas at the University of Oxford, Department of the History of Art, as well as UCLA Research Professor in Art History and Chicana/o and Central American Studies. From 2023-2025, she served as Chair of UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies (CCAS). She was editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, the flagship journal of the field, from 2016-2025, and founding editor-in-chief of the award-winning journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (LALVC, 2017-2023). During her time at UCLA, she created robust undergraduate and graduate programs in global early modern art, colonial art in the Americas, and Latinx art histories. In 2016, she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence, bestowed annually on one faculty member in recognition of exceptional teaching, innovative research, and strong commitment to university service. She has trained to date 15 Ph.D. students and a postdoctoral fellow, and has advised 37 undergraduate honors students, including numerous Mellon Mays Fellows and McNair Scholars. Her former graduate students have gone on to important positions as professors and curators.

Villaseñor Black publishes on a range of topics related to the early modern Iberian world, contemporary Latinx art, and Chicanx studies She has published eight books, including scholarly monographs and edited or co-edited anthologies, and over 80 scholarly articles, ranging from short reviews to long-form original research essays. Her scholarship has been recognized by grants from the Fulbright, Terra, Mellon, Borchard, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Getty Foundation. From 2019-2022, she was Principal Investigator of “Critical Mission Studies at California’s Crossroads,” a $1.03 million dollar grant from the University of California’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives. During 2021-2022, she was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford. She was named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2022-2023. To date, she has won fifteen awards for her editing work, including two awards recognizing LALVC as outstanding new journal.

In addition to serving as CCAS department chair at UCLA, Villaseñor Black was Associate Director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center from 2016-2021 and its Interim/Acting Director in fall 2015. She lived in UCLA’s residence halls as Faculty in Residence from 2010-2020 and again in 2022-2023. From 2018-2020, she was Annual Conference Program Chair of the College Art Association.

Education

Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1995

Books

Selected Links