Leandro Martinez Depietri
Email:
l9martinez@ucsd.edu
Pronouns:
He/Him
Biography:
Leandro Martínez Depietri is an Argentine curator, writer, and educator based between Buenos Aires and San Diego. He is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. His research examines modern and contemporary art in Latin America, with a particular focus on Argentina, through the lenses of materiality and sculpture, indigeneity, internal colonialism, and the racialization of class. His work explores how modern aesthetics both encoded and unsettled the spatial and epistemic structures of the Argentine settler nation-state.
In 2025, he co-curated with Roberto Amigo the reinstallation of the permanent collection of Argentine art at the Colección Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat. In 2024, he curated Chiachio & Giannone: Vivir sus vidas, the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the Argentine queer textile duo. In 2026, he will curate Continente oscuro at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, an exhibition examining the legacy of surrealism in the work of Argentine women and queer artists from the 1940s to the present.
In 2021, he served as a member of the curatorial team of BIENALSUR – International Contemporary Art Biennial of South America, where he curated projects at the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo (Buenos Aires), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (MACRO), and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (MAR). His writing has appeared in scholarly and institutional publications, including Material Meanings (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2020), and he contributed to the exhibition catalogue for For Dear Life at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as part of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. He is the author of Putting Things on Black & White, a study of the racialization of class in Argentine contemporary art, and in 2020 received third prize at the I Concurso de Ensayos Críticos y Curatoriales de Arte Argentino y Latinoamericano (Fundación PROA/AACA). He has taught contemporary art theory at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín and serves as a teaching assistant in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego.
