Kency Cornejo is and art historian of contemporary Latinx/Latin American art and expressive culture. She is associate professor, vice chair, and director of graduate studies in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and joint faculty in the Department of Art History at UCLA. Her research and teaching specializations include art and visual culture of Central America and its diasporas; creative interventions in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist social movements; and decolonial aesthetics and methodologies in art.
Dr. Cornejo’s publications on US/Central American art can be found in various scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues, and edited volumes. Her recent book, Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America (Duke University Press, 2024), features forty artists and over eighty artworks and traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of US-funded civil wars in Central America. Visual Disobedience was awarded the 2026 Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) Book Award; the 2025 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize; and was Joint-Winner of the 2025 Latin American Studies Association (LASA)-Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize. She is currently working on a second monograph on Black-Indigenous and Afro Central American Art and is also co-editing an anthology titled Compton: Reflections on Art and the City. Before joining UCLA, Dr. Cornejo was a faculty member in the Art History Department at the University of New Mexico (2014-2024). Her scholarship has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford Foundations, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award Grant, and a Mellon-funded Crossing LatinidadesResearch Collaboration Grant. She was born to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California.
Education
Ph.D., Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University
M.A., Latin American Art History, University of Texas at Austin
B.A., Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
Research
- Contemporary Art of Central America and its Diasporas
- Chicana/o & Latinx Art
- Contemporary Latin American Art
- Afro-Latin American Diasporic Art
- Art and Activism
- Decolonial Aesthetics and Methodologies in Art
- Anti-Racist, Anti-Colonial, Post-Colonial, Decolonial Thought
Books
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- Visual Disobedience
- Art and Decoloniality in Central America
- Durham: Duke University Press, Dissident Acts Series, 2024
Courses
Undergraduate:
- Art of Central America and its Diaspora
- Chicana/o & Latinx Art
- Experimental Art and Politics in Latin/x America, Post-1968
- Intro to Chicana/o & Central American Studies
Graduate:
- Art & Border Imperialism
- Central American Art
- Decolonial Aesthetics
- Methods/Theories for Chicana/o & Latinx Art
- Art & Feminisms
- Afro-Latin American & Afro-Latinx Art
Selected Publications
Articles & Book Chapters:
- Conejo, Kency. “Shared Legacies and Regional Dialogues: Guatemala and the Central American Art Context” in País Matinal: Una historia crítica del arte de Guatemala, 1871-2025 (Matinal Country: A Critical History of Guatemalan Art 1871-2020) Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Jose Falcomi, eds. 3 vols. (Guatemala: Fundación de la Alta Verapaz, 2026): 264-287.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Central America at Self-Help Graphics: Camaraderie and Artmaking in the City of Angels” in Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking, edited by Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2023):191-223.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Megawealth and its Entanglement with Art and Colonial Aesthetics” in The Strike MoMA Reader, The Strike MoMA Working Group of International Imagination of Anti-national, Anti-imperialist Feelings (IIAAF), editors (Verso Books, 2021):144-149.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Sonic Healing in the Age of Border Imperialism: The Art of Guadalupe Maravilla” in Gean Moreno, editor, Guadalupe Maravilla: Portalsexhibition Catalogue (Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2021):10-25.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Writing Art Histories from Below: A Decolonial Guanaca-Hood Perspective” in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal(University of California Press, 2019) Vol 1 No 3 (July): 72-77.
- Cornejo, Kency. “US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, 2019: 1-27
- Cornejo, Kency. “Visual Counter Narratives: Central American Art on Migration and Criminalization,” in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 5 No 2 (Spring 2017); 63-82.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Honduras-Artistas en Resistencia” in Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant Kester, so-editors. Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017; 79-97.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Decolonial Futurisms: Ancestral Border Crossers, Time Machines, and Space Travel in Salvadoran Art,” in Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas. Hernández, Stallings, and Szupinska-Myers, eds. Riverside: UCR ARTSblock, 2017: 20-31.
- Cornejo, Kency. “‘Does that come with a Hyphen? A Space?’ The Question of Central American-Americans in Latino Art and Pedagogy” in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies40 no. 1 92015): 189-210.
- Cornejo, Kency. “Migrants that Matter: The Intricacies of Migration in Regina José Galindo’s Performance Art” in Regina José Galindo: Bearing Witness, Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, 2015; 30-37.
- Cornejo, Kency. “No Text Without Context: Habacuc Guillermo Vargas’ Exposition #1” inArt and Documentation/Sztuka i Dokumentacja 10 (2014): 53-59.
