October 7, 2025
The ICAA is pleased to introduce the 2025-2026 ¡Aquí Estamos!: Latinx Art at the Museum of Fine Arts fellow cohort, supported by the Mellon Foundation and Terra Foundation for American Art. Under the mentorship of the ICAA and the Museum’s curatorial, conservation, and learning and interpretation departments, fellows will conduct research on archival materials, works in the MFAH collections, and potential acquisitions, as well as contribute to the care and interpretation of works by Latinx artists.
Meet the 2025-2026 ¡Aquí Estamos!: Fellows
Predoctoral Research Fellow (California), ICAA: Gilda Posada
Gilda will identify, research, and annotate selected documents related to California-based Latinx artists and artist collectives. Gilda will also conduct on-site research and help to identify potential partner repositories in California.
Gilda Posada is an artist, independent curator, and art historian from Southeast Los Angeles. Her scholarship focuses on Chicanx-Indigenous feminist and queer decolonial practices through art and visual culture. Currently, Posada is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Reigniting the Sacred Fire: An Analysis of Chicana-Indigenous and Queer Chicanx Art,” which examines the art of five Chicanx artists, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Yreina Cervantez, Laura Aguilar, Celia H. Rodriguez, and rafa esparza. Her research locates meaning in expansive Chicanx artistic practices that center land, spirit, and memory and considers how Chicanx artists have deployed materiality, installations, and performance as a method to re-connect to Indigenous knowledges, ceremonies, medicines and creation stories.
Posada received her AB from UC Davis in Chicana/o Studies and Comparative Literature. She graduated with a dual degree from California College of the Arts in the MFA Social Practice program and the M.A. Visual and Critical Studies program. Prior to her graduate work, she served as the Curator for Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, CA and Assistant Director for Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer in Woodland, CA. From 2022-2025, Posada served as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at Oakland Museum of California, where she curated an extensive and multigenerational Chicanx exhibition titled Calli: The Art of Xicanx Peoples.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ICAA: Pau Nava
Pau will research Latinx artists and collectives in Chicago and the greater Midwest. They will also contribute to the development of new partnerships in the region.
Pau Ruby Nava (they/them) is a Chicana feminist scholar and public historian specializing in Latine/x visual culture and QTBIPOC self-publishing in the Midwest. They hold a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan. As a community archivist, they value the collection of oral histories and have been involved in archival digital humanities projects such as Chicana por mi raza and Mexican American Art since 1848. Their dissertation, “The Artist as Archivist: A Chicago Case Study,” examines how artists use community-based archival practices to circulate and reimagine local history, integrating these methods into the narrative of Chicago and Chicano art history. They are an alumnus of both the Smithsonian’s Latino Museum Studies Program and the seminar “The Archive: Theory, Form, and Practice” at the Newberry Library. Pau is also a zine artist and spoken word poet who has run the DIY publishing project Venadito Press since 2016. They have exhibited their zines at New York Feminist Zine Fest, Chicago Zine Fest, Zine Mercado, and Midwest Queer & Trans Zine Fest. Their zines can be read at the Barnard Zine Library and Trumbullplex Zine Library.
Prior to graduate study, Pau was a teaching artist at the National Museum of Mexican Art and a freelance mural tour guide of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood for DePaul University’s department of Latin American & Latino Studies. They got their B.A. in Art History and Latin American & Latino Studies from DePaul University, where they worked at the Center for Latino Research and the DePaul Richardson Library. Pau is a first-generation PhD and McNair scholar who is passionate about building more awareness of print culture practices and queer Latinx narratives from the Midwest.
Postdoctoral Curatorial Research Fellow, Latinx Art: Angela Pastorelli-Sosa
Angela will assist the MFAH department of Latin American and Latino Art in the study of Latinx artworks in the Museum’s collections as well as in the research and identification of works by Latinx artists for potential acquisition. She will also contribute to the development of collection displays and public programs that center on Latinx artists.
Angela is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art department at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in modern and contemporary art of the Americas and the Caribbean. Her dissertation, “X Marks the Spot: Latinx Artists Mapping Space,” focuses on four Latinx artists whose works interrogate the co-construction of space and identity within contested geographies they are intimately familiar with. These artists reinterpret historical objects to investigate how ongoing territorial conflicts in borderlands, commonwealths, and urban sites are linked to discovery narratives, early modern cartography, and identity formations. This project reads its objects of study as spatial practices that map and propose borderless futures. Angela’s research has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino.
In addition to her research fellowships, Angela is a 2023 alumna of the Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Seminar in Curatorial Practice. In 2019, she helped organize About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Previously, Angela worked at a commercial gallery in New York and held a curatorial internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Continuing Fellows:
Conservation Research Fellow, Latinx Art: Camille Ferrer
Camille will assist in compiling a comprehensive survey of the MFAH’s collection of Latino art through examinations, condition assessments, material analysis, and recommendations for object treatment .
Camille Ferrer is originally from Puerto Rico, where she started her conservation experience as an intern at the Museo de Arte de Ponce. She earned a B.A. in Art History with a minor in Chemistry at Suffolk University in Boston. She then pursued a dual master’s degree in Conservation of Art and Cultural Heritage, specializing in paintings (MA) and Conservation Science and Imaging (MS) at the Garman Art Conservation Department at SUNY Buffalo State in New York. As part of her pre-program training, she interned in large and small museums and private conservation practices.
Prior to joining MFAH, Camille was an Andrew Mellon Fellow in Painting Conservation at the Brooklyn Museum, NY, where she assisted in remodeling the American exhibit. She is honored to be a part of the ¡Aquí Estamos! initiative as a conservation fellow and to conduct research and analysis of source material and conservation of Latinx artworks at the MFAH.
Predoctoral Research Fellow (Texas), ICAA Latinx Papers Project: Alana J. Coates
Alana will work to identify, research and annotate selected documents related to Texas-based Latinx artists and artist collectives. Alana will also help to establish new collaborations and conduct on-site research at collaborating repositories across Texas.
Alana J. Coates holds bachelor’s degrees in art history and fine arts from the University of Rhode Island. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio, specializing in art history and nonprofit leadership. After serving as a director in both private and academic galleries, she chose to pursue a Ph.D. in the art of the Americas at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on contemporary art, with a special emphasis on the art of Texas, inspired by her decade-long residence in San Antonio. She is honored to conduct an in-depth study of primary source materials on Texas artists as an ICAA Pre-doctoral Research Fellow.
Research and Metadata Development Fellow, ICAA Latinx Papers Projects: Gwen A. Unger
Gwen will assist in the development of new vocabularies and metadata specific to the Latinx Papers Project. Gwen will also conduct onsite research in partner repositories with a research focus on Caribbean diasporas in Latinx communities.
Gwen A. Unger holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University in the City of New York, where she specialized in modern and contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Art. Her dissertation, “Other Selves: Critical Self-Portraiture in Cuba during the ‘Special Period in Time of Peace’ 1990-1999” considers how three Black Cuban artists— Elio Rodriguez, Belkis Ayón, and Rene Peña—negotiate questions of race, subjectivity, and belonging through the portrayal of alter-egos. Gwen’s research draws from art history of the African Diaspora, Afro-Cuban studies, Caribbean theory, and Black Queer studies, among other fields. While at Columbia, Gwen served as coordinator of the Columbia Graduate Colloquium and co-organizer of the Fifth Annual Symposium of Latin American Art. She also helped to co-found the lecture series “Unusual Scenes: A Series of Unorthodox Conversations in Art History. Recently, Gwen co-curated the exhibition Sin Autorización: Contemporary Cuban Art at the Wallach Art Gallery and contributed to Selected Essays On the Work of Gertrudis Rivalta, edited by Jacqueline Loss.
¡Aquí Estamos! Latinx Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the ICAA Latinx Papers Project receive generous funding from:
The Mellon Foundation
Terra Foundation for American Art
