At the UTSA School of Art, we pride ourselves in having so many successful and accomplished art historians who originated from our program. From curatorial positions to directors of art museums, many of our graduates have flourished in their careers within the art world. We *curated* a list below!
Bianca Alvarez
Bianca Alvarez received her BFA, with a specialty in painting, from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), in 2013. In 2016, she earned an MA in Art History from UTSA. Her thesis, The Birth of a Community-Based Mural Movement: The Story of San Anto Cultural Arts, is the first scholarly exploration of the local grassroots organization—San Anto—and places it within the intricate network of nationwide community murals. Other research projects have investigated cultural identity in the visual arts.
She has held adjunct faculty positions at UTSA and Baptist University of the Americas, teaching undergraduate art history classes. She was previously the Grants and Sponsorships Officer at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio; prior, the 2017-2018 Semmes Foundation Intern in Museum Studies, where she worked with the Museum’s curatorial team in the research, development, and execution of its exhibitions. She curated the exhibition, Mel Casas: Human at the McNay, and co-curated the summer 2019 exhibition, Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, at the Museum, as well.
She is currently the Public Art Project Manager for the City of San Antonio.
Alana Coates
Alana J. Coates is a curator, educator, and arts professional. She has held director positions in private and academic galleries in Rhode Island, Texas, and Pennsylvania. As a current Ph.D. student at the University of New Mexico, she is focusing on contemporary art in the Americas and writing a monograph on the work of Jesse Amado. She was previously the Curator for the Albright College's Freedman Gallery; formerly the Associate Director of Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio, TX, and she also taught Art History and Art Appreciation at the college level. Coates earned a bachelor's degree in both Studio Art and Art History from the University of Rhode Island in 2005. And in 2012, she obtained a master's degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio in Art History along with a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Administration and Leadership. She has worked in the creative sector holding positions at a number of reputable organizations such as Gallery Night Providence, Gallery Z, The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Her scholarly projects have focused on the prints of José Guadalupe Posada and Spanish Colonial casta paintings. She has given a number of presentations on both topics including a presentation at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Texas centered on the prints by Posada in their collection. Her master's thesis is titled "Casta Paintings Revisited: The Case for Single-Panel Analysis and Artist Agency."
Marissa Del Toro
Marissa Del Toro is the Assistant Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. In both her professional and personal life, she continues to work towards the promotion and advocacy for diverse narratives within art.
Since 2021, Del Toro has worked with Museums Moving Forward, a data-driven initiative to support greater equity and accountability in art museum workplaces through coalition-building, research, and advocacy. She is currently co-curating with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Gilbert Vicaro the upcoming traveling exhibition, Xican-a.o.x. Body set for Summer 2023; she has guest curated and written for several institutions including the Latinx Project at NYU, Gagosian 2022 Fall Quarterly, Lehmann Maupin in New York City, and the Mission Cultural Latino Center in San Francisco, CA. She was most recently a 2021-2022 curatorial fellow at NXTHVN, where she co-curated two exhibitions and worked alongside the studio fellows in developing their professional practice. She previously held positions at Phoenix Art Museum from 2018-2020; Santa Barbara Museum of Art from 2017-2018; the Getty Research Institute as a Graduate Intern from 2016-2017; UTSA Art Gallery as the Curatorial Assistant Intern from 2014 to 2015. In July 2015, she participated in the Latino Museum Studies Program at the Smithsonian Latino Center. She graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio with her MA in Art History and is originally from Southern California, where she received her BA in Art History from the University of California, Riverside.
Jackie Edwards
In graduate school at UTSA, Jackie's concentration was in Spanish Baroque Art and her thesis title was Evolution and Revolution: El Greco's Byzantine Roots in his Spanish Paintings. She graduated with her MA in 2011, and her career at the McNay Art Museum began in 2012 when she became a Semmes Foundation Intern in Museum Studies. From 2013-2017 Edwards held the position of Curatorial Assistant until her promotion to Assistant Curator at the McNay. She has curated School at Sunset Hills: San Antonio Art Institute Artists in the McNay's Permanent Collection in 2014, and To See Is to Have: Navigating Today's Art Ecosystem in 2017, both at the McNay Art Museum. Her publications include A Century of Art and Community: The History of the San Antonio Art League (San Antonio, Texas: San Antonio Art League, 2012) and "Something Greater: Floral Significance in Dutch Golden Age Painting and Recent Work by Lisa Qualls," an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Lisa Qualls: A Collection of Silence (San Antonio, Texas: French & Michigan Gallery, 2015)
She's currently pursuing her PhD at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and working as a Program Assistant in American art at Henry Luce Foundation Inc.
Edward Hayes
Edward Hayes joined International Arts and Artists in November 2018 to expand IA&A's projects nationally and in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. From 2013 to 2018, Hayes was a curator for the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, California where he coordinated over 50 exhibitions, creating original projects such as Neomexicanism (2014) and Magical Realism and Modern Oaxaca: An Homage to Gabriel Garcia Márquez (2015). He is the curator of MOLAA's first solo exhibitions of Chicano art including Dreamland: A Frank Romero Retrospective (2017) and Judithe Hernández: A Dream is the Shadow of Something Real (2018). Hayes also coordinated the installation of exhibitions Frida Kahlo: Her Photos (2014), organized by Museo Frida Kahlo, and the Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (2017), now touring the East Coast. Hayes holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006) and an MA in Art History from The University of Texas at San Antonio (2010).
He is currently the Director of the El Paso Museum of Art.
Dr. Adriana Miramontes Olivas
Dr. Adriana Miramontes Olivas is Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American & Caribbean Art at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Miramontes Olivas brings a variety of museum and academic experience to the role, having worked as the Assistant in Museum and Community Engagement in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, where she also served as a Teaching Fellow lecturing on World Art. She has also worked for the art gallery at The University of Texas at San Antonio, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso, and the El Paso Museum of Art.
Miramontes Olivas earned her PhD in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she focused on art of the border of Ciudad Juárez-El Paso, feminicide, and narcoviolence in site-specific interventions, installation, performance, and video art. Her dissertation “Los neoliberarchivos: Contemporary Art at the Mexico – U.S. Border” examines how contemporary artistic practices disrupt political, economic, and cultural hegemonic narratives that negate or dismiss a spectacle of death and a state of criminality where bodies are abused, disposed of, and rendered ungrievable by a variety of institutions, the state, and a criminal class. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Texas at San Antonio. In 2008, she earned her BA in Art from the University of Texas at El Paso.
Miramontes has been the recipient of the Pre-Dissertation Tinker Summer Fellowship by the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and the Alfredo D. and Luz María P. Gutiérrez Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh.
Liz Paris
Liz Paris earned her BA in English with a minor in Art History from the University of the Incarnate Word in 2011 and her Master of Arts in Art History from UTSA in 2015. Her thesis title was Suspension of Grief (And Disbelief): The Evolution of Postmortem Photography in Nineteenth Century America. She is currently the Collections Manager at the McNay Art Museum, where she also co-curated Beyond Belief and Womanish.
Exhibitions Paris has curated include The Lullwood Group Presents: Dan Lam at 107 Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2017), Parlour Games: Ruloff Kip’s Toy Theatre at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2016-17), and Sour Grapes: From Street to Studio, UTSA Art Gallery, San Antonio, TX ((2014, included catalogue).
