2018-19 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Dr. Deanna Ledezma (she/her) is the Postdoctoral Research Associate and Writing Lab Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative (2024–present). She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois Chicago and held the position of  Postdoctoral Research Associate of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/UIC Mellon Fellowship Program from 2022 to 2024. She is currently completing her book manuscript Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography. Her previous publications have appeared in Art Journal, Photography & Culture, caa.reviews, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and the book Reworking Labor. Her forthcoming essay on the photographic archives of Diana Solís will be published in Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships (Rutgers University Press, 2025). Green Lantern Press and Walls Divide Press have distributed her nonfiction essays.

She has taught undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on Latinx art and visual culture, Latin American art, identities in modern and contemporary art, the history and theory of photography, and Latinx literature and life writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Complementing her teaching and scholarship, she collaborates with artists on creative projects, including publications, archival research, and exhibitions. The place where the creek goes underground, an exhibition by Anthony Romero (Dartmouth College) with Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios (SAIC), opens at Harvard Radcliffe Institute in September 2024 with a forthcoming artists’ publication in November 2024. Ledezma, Rios, and Romero co-created the installation Ballad of the Uprooted for the exhibition Re:Working Labor (SAIC Sullivan Galleries, 2019). Ledezma and Rios were also awarded the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) Truth and Reconciliation Thematic Residency in 2019. She has also written introductory texts for Diana Solís’s artist’s book Luz: Seeing the Space Between Us (2022) and the exhibition catalog for Akito Tsuda: Pilsen Days (Chicago Public Library, 2024). In 2023, Nicole Marroquin (University of Michigan) and Ledezma co-curated the group exhibition Contigo, Diana Solís at Co-Prosperity.

For more information, please visit her website: www.deannaledezma.com.

Dr. Rocío R. García is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University since August 2019. García earned her doctorate degree in sociology from the University of California Los Angeles. She defended her dissertation, “Latinx Feminist Thought,” in May 2019. Her research interests focus on intersectionality, social movements, critical social theory, and reproductive justice. Her book manuscript, Latinx Feminist Thought: On Difference, Messiness, and Politicmaking (under contract with Routledge Press), focuses on the tensions and contributions of an array of Latinx feminist scholarship along with ethnographic data on Latinx feminist praxis in the movement for reproductive justice. Her articles have been published in journals including Sociological Perspectives, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Sociology Compass, and Societies. In addition to IUPLR, García’s work has received generous support form the American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Dr. Angélica Becerra is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the division of Modern and Contemporary Prints and Drawings, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. She received her Ph.D. in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Her dissertation titled “Envisioning a Chicana Radical Digital Aesthetic: Artivism in the Twenty-first Century” was completed in Spring of 2021. In addition to the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellowship, she has received an ACLS/Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship in Digital Technology and Culture at Washington State University and is part of the third cohort of the American Art Journal Towards Equity in Publishing fellowship program. Her essays have been published in Boom: A Journal of California, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She wrote an essay for Christin Apodaca’s exhibition Proving the Hypothesis of Celestial Flirtation (2023) at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. She co-curated Borderlands: Expanded Views of the Southwest (May-November 2024) with Emily Francisco and Betsy Fortune. Forthcoming publications include “Proudly Defiant, Glittering Cicatrices: the subversive work of José Villalobos and Moises Salazar” (Spring 2025) in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. She is currently co-curating a works on paper exhibition on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art, Los Angeles LGBT Center; Her print 1-800-PAY-A-FEMME was acquired by the Library of Congress Prints and Drawings division in 2022.

Dr. Carmela Muzio Dormani is a Bronx-based sociologist, dancer, and creative producer. She completed her PhD at CUNY Graduate  Center in May 2020 and is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology and Behavioral Sciences at Mercy College, where she teaches courses on race, class, gender, and culture. Her research centers on everyday cultural practices in multiethnic/multiracial communities, with a particular focus on New York City history, movements for social change, and grassroots dance practices. Her research project, “The Life and Death of Mambo: Culture and Consumption in New York’s Salsa Scene,” explores the tensions between community-building and racialized commodification in the “on2” salsa dance world. The project looks at the changing ways in which people practice, produce, and consume culture in cities. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture and Latino Studies and been supported by IUPLR and CUNY’s Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC). Carmela produces a podcast about building creative and economic lifelines outside of academia called The Millennial PhD: Creative Survival at Work and Beyond and serves as a freelance consultant on various writing, content creation, and digital media projects.

Dr. Alex La Rotta is an Assistant Professor at Houston Community College. Formerly, he served as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Department of History and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race where he teaches U.S. Latinx History and Black/Brown History of Rock & Roll. An avid record collector and DJ, his scholarship focuses on race and popular music in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. His manuscript in preparation investigates sonic affinities and cultural kinships across African-American and Mexican-American communities in twentieth-century San Antonio, Texas. With the support from the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/Mellon Fellowship, he received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Houston in Summer 2019.

Dr. Felix Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Art Education at Illinois State University, where he began teaching in January 2023. Before that, Felix was a Lecturer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, an Adjunct Professor at Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Ureña (UNPHU), and Art Education Supervisor for the Department of Education of the Dominican Republic. He holds a Ph.D. in Art Education with a minor in Latin American Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. With CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (DSI) support, Felix was granted the 2018-2019 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellowship. His doctoral research, “Mapping Contested Identities in Dominican Art Education: A Critical History,” has also been recognized by the Penn State Alumni Association, the Penn State Humanities Institutes, and CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. An essay from his dissertation received the 2020 Dominican National Archive Essay Award, one of the highest distinctions for historical research in the Dominican Republic. His dissertation has also provided the groundwork for a published a peer-reviewed article, two book chapters, and numerous conference presentations. Felix was granted the 2024 Illinois State University Research Grant, which will support archival and oral history research on Rafael Diaz Niese’s (1897-1950) impact on Dominican Art. Felix is interested in pedagogical initiatives addressing migration, border-crossing, negated blackness, racism, and gender exclusion, mainly focusing on the Caribbean experience.

Dr. Sharina Maillo Pozo (Felix Rodriguez), SUNY, Department of Languages, Literatures & Culture
Dr. Jennifer Jones (Rocío García), University of Illinois Chicago, Department of Sociology
Dr. Rachel Gonzalez (Deanna Ledezma), University of Austin Texas, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies
Dr. Petra R Rivera-Rideau (Alex La Rotta), Wellesley College, American Studies
Dr. Sydney Jane Hutchinson (Carmela Dormani), Syracuse University, Music History & Cultures
Dr. Kency Cornejo (Angelica Becerra), University of New Mexico, Department of Art & Art History