Sara Solaimani
Email:
ssolaima@ucsd.edu
Biography:
Sara Solaimani is a doctoral candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UCSD’s Department of Visual Arts. Her current research focuses on the work of performance artists of Mexican roots in the United States between the 1960s culture war era and NAFTA (1968-1994). Sara’s work highlights artistic interrogations of geopolitical and metaphorical borders that deconstruct our understanding of space in the age of global capital, and identifies critical questions about identity in a compartmentalized world. In particular, she is interested in using her writing to distinguish the often conflated histories of Chicanx Performance Art of the 1960s and ‘70s, and Border Art in the 1980s and ‘90s, paying particular attention to the problematic category “Latino.” Sara’s advocacy work includes translation and interpretation for political asylum-seekers and survivors of domestic violence detained in private immigration prisons. In 2011, she graduated from the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at SDSU, with a Master’s thesis on the multidimensional questioning of transborder space by Tijuanense artist Marcos Ramírez ERRE. She has published and presented several texts, and curated exhibitions on the historical relationship between politics, geopolitics and art on the Tijuana-San Diego border and in Mexico. Sara currently teaches writing, art history, and Chicano studies at UCSD and SDSU.
