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MARÍA CAMILA MONTALVO-SENIOR
Art curator, researcher, writer and lecturer. I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Granada, Spain, funded by the Horizon Europe programme. I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (awarded with the highest distinction), including a research stay at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany; an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; and a BA in Arts from Universidad de los Andes.
My work lies at the intersection of contemporary art curating, academic research and collaborative research-creation with artists and local communities, particularly across the Andes, Amazon, Orinoquia and Colombian Pacific region. I combine artistic and curatorial practices with social and educational processes involving community museums, memory, peacebuilding, environmental stewardship and local cultural economies, contributing to public policy debates. My current research extends these interests through international collaborations across Europe and Africa, integrating multimodal ethnography, expanded curatorial practice, community museography, university teaching and knowledge exchange.
I have curated over twenty exhibitions in Colombia and the United States, including De selvas, mitos y canoas, presented at the 46th National Artists' Salon (2022), organised by Colombia’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Knowledge. From 2015 to 2020, I founded and directed LIBERIA – Central Contemporánea, an independent contemporary art space in Bogotá dedicated to exhibitions, curatorial projects, publications and educational programmes.
I have received several national and international awards, including the 2026 ENCATC Research Award, presented by the European Network on Cultural Management and Policy (ENCATC); the Research Excellence Award in Social Anthropology and History from the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH); and the 2026 CCS Bard Alumni Award. I have published articles and books in international academic journals and with scholarly publishers, received further grants and fellowships, and served as a juror and evaluator for competitive funding programmes in art, culture, research and heritage.
FuturosCurados.co brings together my curatorial practice, academic research, writing and teaching through collaborations with artists, scholars, local communities and cultural organisations. Its conceptual foundation lies in the Spanish verb curar, derived from the Latin curāre: to care for, attend to, treat, heal and preserve. It also connects curaduría (curating) with curandería (traditional healing practices), and the transformation of materials through time, contact and care. These meanings inform the website’s five interconnected constellations — Caring, Treating, Curating, Healing and Preserving — through which I explore curating as a practice of accompanying transformations, sustaining relationships and transmitting knowledge.
The website brings together exhibitions, publications, ethnographic research, collaborative research-creation and educational projects, connecting contemporary art with material and embodied practices, community museums, memory and environmental knowledge. Developed across South and Central America, and extending through collaborations in Europe and Africa, these projects engage with colonial histories, social inequalities, armed conflict and ecological crises. Through situated methodologies of making, travelling, listening and creating together, they explore relationships between bodies, materials, territories and more-than-human life, challenging distinctions between art and craft, knowledge and practice, and nature and culture.
Both an archive and an evolving space for artistic and scholarly experimentation, FuturosCurados.co brings these experiences into correspondence, revealing connections across different places, materials and forms of knowledge. Grounded in relationality, multispecies ecologies and the material politics of life, it approaches social and environmental transformation through care, collective creation and the preservation of living knowledge. It is an invitation to imagine and cultivate possible futures through the relationships we establish and the worlds we transform, attentive to the multiple forms of life with which we share the Earth.