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Biography
Paloma Checa-Gismero is Associate Professor of art history in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego. A historian of global contemporary art, her research focuses on the histories of production, institutionalization, and valuation of art. She intervenes in debates in Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial scholarship. She is the author of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024), winner of the 2026 Latin American Visual Culture Studies Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and the 2022 Millard Meiss Publication Award, College of Art Association (CAA).
Her interdisciplinary scholarship is interwoven with longstanding practices of engagement with non-scholarly publics through writing, art making, curating, and pedagogic activities that extend beyond the classroom. She has published widely on art biennials, craft histories, and socially engaged art.
Checa-Gismero has published research, analysis, and criticism in Third Text, The Journal of Modern Craft, MARCH, Afterall, LA Review of Books, FIELD, La Tempestad, Adesk, CONCRETA, LASA forum. She is co-author of Los Sujetos, catalog of Spanish pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and translator to Spanish of Lucy Lippard’s novel I See / You Mean (1975, 2016).
Previous to arriving at UCSD she was a tenured professor at Swarthmore College. During the academic year 2023/24 she was Regional Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from UC San Diego (2019), as well as an MFA in Art Production and Research (2009) and a BFA in Fine Arts (2008) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.