Hi there! I’m Paula Victoria Kupfer, PhD, an art historian, writer, and educator from Panama. I’m a specialist in the history of photography and modern and contemporary art from Latin America, and am a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh . My research concerns the intersections of landscape, race, and environment, as well as the movement of artists, artworks, and ideas, from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
Selected Publications
“How Can Photography Shape Our Relationship to the Environment?” Aperture online, November 22, 2024
“Variations on Landscape, Environment, and History: Lola Álvarez Bravo’s Paisajes de México (1954).” Dialectic: The Journal of the School of Architecture of the University of Utah, no. 10, Decarbonizing Design / Mobilizing Agency (2022): 9–24.
“1965–1969: Nostalgia, Pop, and Revolution.” In What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, 145–69. New York: 10×10 Photobooks, 2021. Book chapter and essays. Winner of the 2021 Aperture–Paris Photography Catalog of the Year Award and the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award
“Gertrudes Altschul and the Elements of a (Brazilian) Landscape.” In Gertrudes Altschul: Filigree, edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, 76–88. São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2021. Catalog essay.
“Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris & W. Eugene Smith in Pittsburgh.” In Dispatch: Carnegie International, 57th Edition 2018, edited by Liz Park and Ingrid Schaffner, 120–22. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2019.
Education
PhD, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
PhD thesis: “Marc Ferrez’s Landscapes of Intervention: Photography, Ecology, and Enslavement in Imperial Brazil”
MA, Art History, Hunter College, City University of New York
Master’s thesis: “Gertrudes Altschul and the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Modern Photography and Femininity in 1950s São Paulo”
