Larissa Nez (Diné) is of the Mud People and born for the Mountain Cove People. Her maternal grandfather is of the Red Running into the Water People and her paternal grandfather is of the Big Water People. She was born and raised in Diné Bikéyah (Navajo Nation).
Larissa is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, at the University of California, Berkeley. Centering critical Indigenous theory, decolonial theory, and the Black Radical Tradition, her research explores the relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity. Focusing on the work of modern and contemporary Afro-Indigenous, Black, and Indigenous visual artists and filmmakers, Larissa seeks to articulate the ways resistance and survival, kinship and belonging, memory and futurity are intrinsic to the world-making that comes about due to, and in spite of, the world-breaking of colonial and imperial violence. Her research shows how Afro-Indigenous, Black, and Indigenous people are imagining and building worlds and futures that are dialectically and intimately connected to the past and present, land/water/sky and body, and the material and spiritual.
Larissa is currently the Curatorial Graduate Intern with the Contemporary Art Department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art(link is external) and the Borderlands Curatorial Fellow with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics(link is external) at the New School. She is also currently serving on the Advisory Council for the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame and the Artist Initiatives Committee with Creative Capital.
Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Art History, Race, Empire, Colonialism,
