Laura Augusta, PhD makes texts and exhibitions informed by (mis)translation, making relation, personal and political sanación, and close listening to the natural world; her work is structured by the forms and disruptions of conversation with artists and writers. Her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have been published in international magazines, exhibition catalogs, edited volumes, and monographs. Augusta was a Core Critical Studies Fellow at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2016-2018) and, in 2021, a Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. She serves as an advisor and developmental editor for American Art Journal’s Toward Equity in Publishing program, and is currently at work on a book of essays about contemporary visual art in Guatemala City since the democratic uprisings of 2015. Augusta’s occasional letters to visual artists can be found at Studio for Tomorrow. From 2022-2024, she served as the first full-time Curator at The Stanlee & Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso, where she launched a multi-year exhibition program dedicated to contemporary Central American artistic production. In the fall of 2024, she will become the next Jane Dale Owen Director and Chief Curator at The Blaffer Art Museum at The University of Houston.