Maysa Martins

Maysa Martins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the modern and contemporary art of the Black Atlantic. It centers on the production of self-taught artists, vernacular aesthetic strategies, and the role of Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual traditions within artistic and political modernities in Brazil, Jamaica, and Angola. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Black Prophets: The Material and Spiritual Archives of the Black Atlantic in the works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Lee Scratch Perry, and Paulo Kapela” considers how the artists’ plethora of sacred and ordinary objects offer insights into the Atlantic’s micro and macro histories from the perspective of modernity’s outliers. 

Martins is the 2024-26 curatorial fellow at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, the former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum (2023-2024), and former educator at Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel de Araújo. She received her M.A. in Art History from UNIFESP (São Paulo, Brazil, 2021) and her BA in Visual Arts from UNESP (São Paulo, Brazil, 2015). 

Articles Related to Maysa Martins

2025-06-02

Announcing the 2025 Cohort of the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice

The Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) is pleased to announce the 2025 cohort of the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice. Now in its eleventh year, the Seminar will provide twelve outstanding students from around the world with the opportunity to engage in the critical responsibilities of museums today.  The ... Read More >