Inês Beleza Barreiros is an art historian, cultural critic, curator, and practice-based scholar who carries out her work both inside and outside academia. Her work focuses on how art and images become knowledge-producing objects, the visual culture, public memory and afterlives of colonialism, and reparation processes in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian world. She holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication (specialization in Visual Culture and Memory Studies) from New York University, an MA in Contemporary Art History from Nova University of Lisbon, and a BA in History and Art History from the University of Lisbon. She also had fruitful study experiences at the New School for Social Research (Anthropology) and at UFR d’Art et Archéologie, Sorbonne – Paris IV.
Inês is currently a professor of art history in the School of Theatre and Cinema (ESTC) at Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, and an integrated researcher of ICNOVA, in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Nova University of Lisbon, where she is national committee manager of the European COST project TRACTS – Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice. She has been working in award-winning documentary films exploring the relation between cinema and other art forms, such as painting, landscape, and architecture. In the recent past, she worked as an editor at La Rampa. Art, Life & Beyond and as policy-making advisor at the Portuguese Parliament, accompanying the legislative procedures in the Commission for the Environment, Energy, and Territorial Planning, with particular focus on Portugal’s Climate Law and a Resolution Proposal for a Strategic Environmental Assessment for Mining.
Her many publications include articles in international peer-reviewed academic journals, such as PLCS - Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies and the Journal of Lusophone Studies, as well as book chapters in prestigious edited volumes for Routledge. She is the author of the book “Sob o Olhar de Deuses sem Vergonha:” Cultura Visual e Paisagens Contemporâneas (2009) and is presently preparing the book manuscript Thinking Visually: The Afterlives of Portuguese Imperialism, in which she lays the foundation of a unique method termed as visual archaeology.
Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Luso-American Development Foundation, The Clark Art Institute, New York University, and Gwaertler Stiftung.
She works between Portugal, Brazil, and the United States.
Next academic year she will be FLAD Visiting Professor at Brown University (Fall 2024) and Michael Ann Holly Fellow at the Clark Art Institute (Spring 2025).