Marisa C. Sanchez, PhD

Sessional Lecturer

Art History, Creative Studies

Office: Working remotely
Email: marisa1s@mail.ubc.ca

Courses & Teaching

ARTH 420 | Curating Contemporary Art; ARTH 309 | Performance Art: Global Perspectives

Biography

Marisa C. Sánchez is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her teaching and research interests include methodologies of art history, feminist art histories, museum studies, curatorial practice, and the intersection of visual art and literature. Her interdisciplinary approach engages the history of art and counter-narratives, which offer inclusive perspectives that broadens the scope and understanding of the study of artists and their work. Sánchez received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2019 where her dissertation, The Beckett Effect: The Work of Stan Douglas, Paul Chan, and Tania Bruguera, examined the uses of Beckett’s discursive reverberations within these artists’ visual practices, locating the “Beckett Effect” as politically and artistically significant in contemporary art. She has published on her dissertation topic including “Foucault’s Beckett” in Michel Foucault: les arts & les letters/arts & humanities in the 21^st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff and published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. Her interview with Stan Douglas appeared in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art, edited by Robert Reginio, David Houston Jones, and Katherine Weiss for Ibidem Press in 2017.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Sánchez was Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, where she curated exhibitions, including love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death – Andy Warhol Media Works, and solo projects with artists Sandra Cinto, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Corin Hewitt, Heide Hinrichs and Mika Tajima. For the museum, she was Co-Curator with Cécile Debray on the exhibition Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou. Before this curatorial position, she was Curatorial Assistant to Anne Wilkes Tucker in the Photography Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where Sánchez curated Two Women Look West, among other photography exhibits drawn from the permanent collection. She also holds an MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she wrote her thesis, Globe Trotting: Gabriel Orozco’s Global Nomadism.  Her writing and criticism have appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals, and she has presented papers internationally at academic conferences. In 2015, she was awarded the Li Tze Fong Fellowship from UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory.

Professor Sánchez teaches modern and contemporary art history as a Sessional Lecturer at UBC, Okanagan and UBC, Vancouver, and in Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design where she recently taught Beckett Now, a course developed from her dissertation research. She has also served as an advisor to second shelf, a collaborative book acquisition project, initiated by Heide Hinrichs at the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp, dedicated to expanding library holdings of publications by artists and scholars who are women, queer, non-binary, and people of colour. In conjunction with second shelf, Sanchez presented a talk at the Academy entitled “Towards a Feminist Practice: Notes on Listening” and her essay on this topic was published recently in shelf documents: art library as practice (2021).