Laura Augusta, PhD, is a U.S.-born curator and writer who has worked between the U.S. and Central America since 2014. Her curatorial/essay projects connect the landscapes of disaster-prone cities, thinking specifically about floods and muddiness, shared space, and everyday forms of resistance. Her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City was awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2017. She completed the Core Fellowship at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2016-2018), and was an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration in 2021.
As an independent curator, she curated more than 20 exhibitions at museums, university galleries, and artist-run spaces across the U.S. and Central America; her writing about art has been published internationally in artist monographs, edited volumes, journals, exhibition catalogs, and online. Augusta currently works with the Archives of American Art’s Oral History Project to collect the art histories of Latina/o/x artist elders and is a developmental editor and program consultant for American Art Journal’s landmark program Toward Equity in Publishing. Since 2022, she has been working as Curator at the Gerald & Stanlee Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso. Located less than a quarter mile from the U.S.-Mexico border, the Rubin Center serves one of the largest bi-national urban environments in the world and remains the only dedicated contemporary art museum in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez region.
