Marina Reyes Franco orients her curatorial approach around the impact of what she terms "the visitor economy regime." It is formed through tourism and the constructed ideas of paradise that permeate the arts, culture, politics, and the land of places like her hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In 2017, Marina received ICI's CPPC Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean to study "the brand identity of paradises" across Panama, The Bahamas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad, and "how cultural workers deal with the neo-colonial impositions brought on by the tourism trade." That research went on to inform several of her curatorial projects, including the groundbreaking exhibition Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime.
Marina also co-curated the ICI traveling exhibition Sunlight on the Sea Floor with Paula Naughton. The exhibition pairs the work of Chagos Islands painter Clément Siatous with those of eleven other artists. Together, they create cross-regional connections among shared experiences of history, identity, colonialism, and displacement, and articulate the importance of radical imagination and collective memory.