Quoting name: Sofia Steinvorth

Professional Category: PhD Candidate (IHA/FCT scholarship)

PhD project: Contemporary Socio-Spatial Practices and Emerging Cultural Structures from Mexico City and São Paulo

Supervisor: Margarida Brito Alves, IHA-NOVA FCSH/IN2PAST Advisor: Rodrigo Queiroz, PGEHA-USP

Position(s) within IHA: RG Member [Contemporary Art Studies]

Thematic areas: Contemporary Art; Site-specific; Socially Engaged Art; Cities; Independent Art Institutions; Curating; Spatial Politics in the city

Contact: sofiasteinvorth@fcsh.unl.pt

CIÊNCIA ID: 3F16-40CB-33E8

ORCiD: 0009-0003-9674-5743

Biography

Sofia Steinvorth is a German-Costa Rican curator, writer and researcher based in Lisbon. She is the author of Knowledge Production in Visual Arts Organisations: A Case Study on the Triangle Network (2023). Her research and curatorial practice revolve around questions of cultural and curatorial infrastructure as well as artistic practices that develop through collective processes of knowledge production. Representation and mediation are recurring themes in her investigations driven by an interest in the cultural production of the Global South. Drawing on human geography and an interest in the processes that lead to the development of a sense of place, her projects are informed by practices that explore, reveal, and reshape the relations among people and their environments.

Between 2019 and 2020 she was part of CuratorLab – Konstfack’s professional curatorial course under the theme “Socially Engaged Curating in Post-Democratic Times” in association with the Visible Project (Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna, Italy). In 2022 she was a curatorial resident at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Johannesburg as part of the TURN2 Programme, where she developed the project Many Hands Make Light Work (2022). Currently, Sofia is pursuing her PhD in Artistic Studies: Art and Mediation at the Art History Department of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa with a scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT ). Her research focuses on the independent art scenes in Mexico City and São Paulo from a curatorial perspective attentive to socio-spatially engaged artistic and curatorial projects that are directly engaged with their localities through community-building processes. Throughout 2024 Sofia is a visiting researcher at the Post-Graduation Programme in Aesthetics and Art History (PGEHA) at Universidade de São Paulo (USP).

(data supplied by the researcher)

Abbreviations:
RG – Research Group