Ángeles Donoso Macaya is an immigrant educator, researcher and activist from Santiago, Chile, based in New York City. She is Professor of Spanish at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY and Professor of Latin American Cultures and Visual Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The CUNY Graduate Center. Ángeles’ research centers on Latin American photography theory and history, counter-archival production, human rights activism, documentary film, and feminisms in the Southern Cone, and public humanities scholarship.
She is the author of La insubordinación de la fotografía (Metales Pesados 2021) / The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship (UP Florida 2020), which received the Best Book Award in Latin American Visual Culture at LASA 2021 and Best Book Award in Recent History and Memory at LASA 2022, and co-editor of Latina/os of the East Coast: A Critical Reader (Peter Lang 2015). Her most recent articles are forthcoming or have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies/Travesía, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, and in the collective volumes Cold War Camera (Duke UP 2023) and Photography and its Publics (Bloomsbury 2020), among others.
Ángeles received a 2021 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship to begin a book-length project tentatively titled The Expanding Photographic Archive of Feminist Movements in Chile and a 2022 FONDART Grant, given by the Chilean National Council for the Arts and Culture, to work on the photo-essay “Archivo Imperfecto” in collaboration with Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz.
Since 2020, Ángeles has been Faculty Lead of Archives in Common: Migrant Practices/ Knowledges/Memory, part of the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center/CUNY. Archives in Common is a public humanities project developed in collaboration with La Morada, an undocumented family-owned and operated Oaxacan restaurant in the South Bronx. Ángeles has written blogs and presented about Archives in Common along her collaborators at different venues, and, through the Public Seminar, has organized and moderated several conversations with activists, artists, and researchers about current issues: food justice, food sovereignty and community garden stewardship, mutual aid organizing and accountability, toxic clouds and state repression, immigration justice and immigration rights activism, and antiracist work.
As member of the activist research collective somoslacélula, she creates video-essays that respond to pressing matters, such as “Matar el ojo” (2020), formulated in collaboration with writer Lina Meruane.
In 2020, Ángeles collaborated with Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the video-investigation Tear Gas in Plaza de la Dignidad.
Ángeles is member of the Anti-Racism Committee of the PSC, and of Rank-and-File Action (RAFA).
