María E. López-García

María Eugenia López-Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Museum and Exhibition Studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously, she was a 2020-2022 Bridge to the Faculty Postdoctoral Scholar at UIC, and she held a 2019-2020 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Latina/o Studies at UIUC.

López-García is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher who studies immigrant and transnational labor, comparative racialization, and women of color feminisms. In her scholarship, López- García investigates the cultural politics of domestic work, centering on the intersections of representation, resistance, and performance. Her current research examines visual and performative works by Latinx and Filipinx artists as feminist epistemologies that make legible the heterogeneity of subjectivities and social experiences of migrant and immigrant domestic workers, the multiple forms of violence they endure, and their daily acts of resistance. Also in the research, she looks into domestic worker activists’ use of aesthetic and political strategies to create and explore alternative representations of migrant domestic work.

As a public scholar, community organizer, and cultural worker, López-García co-directed a community-based museum for grassroots worker coalition La Mujer Obrera, which displayed the history of resistance and labor displacement of garment workers in El Paso, Texas. In addition, she was a co-curator for Museo Urbano, a public history project of the University of Texas at El Paso History Department, awarded the 2013 Outstanding Public History award by the National Council on Public History.