Overview
María is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University specializing in contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts. Her research brings together ecocriticism, political ecology, literary theory, and visual studies to explore the intersections between aesthetics, politics ,and ecology. Her dissertation traces how contemporary novels, poetry, photobooks, and art installations interrogate histories of extraction in the Sonoran Desert, the Atacama Desert, and the Brazilian sertão.
In the summer of 2025, she served as a curatorial fellow at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Her scholarly contributions have been published in Revista Chilena de Literatura, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among other academic journals.
She holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in Literature from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), with a minor in Philosophy. In addition to her academic research, she is also a photographer.