AIISP Soup'er Series with Leonardo Santamaria Montero

Leonardo Santamaría Montero is a PhD student in the History of Art at Cornell University. He holds a BA and a Licentiate degree in Art History from the Universidad de Costa Rica, where he will return as a professor after completing his doctoral studies. Santamaría specializes in Latin American art, specifically nineteenth-century Central American visual and material culture, with a focus on Indigenous aesthetics and their representations. His work examines the transformation of Central American visual identities during the transition from colonial to republican rule, with a particular interest in the sociopolitical uses of pre-Columbian objects and contemporary Indigenous material culture in that process. 

Santamaría has presented his work at conferences such as the Comite International d’Histoire de I’Art World Congress, the Association for Latin American Art Triennial Conference, and the Native American Art Studies Association Conference. Santamaría recently served as a research assistant at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art for the exhibition by Guadalupe Maravilla: Armonía de la Esfera, working specifically with Cornell’s collections of pre-Hispanic objects.

The Soup'er Series by the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, is a weekly lunch program that connects current Indigenous students with guest lectures on various topics within American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and other academic and social opportunities at Cornell.