Biography

Robin Garcia is a Chicana born and raised in Los Angeles from a working-class family of organizers and artists. She completed her doctorate in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University with a focus on Africana Studies, Media Studies, Latin American Studies and Globalization and Culture. Her dissertation: “Community and Cultural Collectives in Contemporary Venezuela,” looked at the role that community media and community museums, culture, performance, and activist collectives have played in recuperating popular versions of anti-colonial Venezuelan history. Her publications include “Decolonial History by/for Afro and Indigenous Venezuelans” in Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), edited by Jennifer Gómez Menjívar and Nicolás Ramos Flores, as well as “Who Owns the Archive? Community Media in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez” in Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas (State University of New York Press, 2014) edited by Julie Shane.

Robin has taught courses across the Humanities curriculum at several Cal State campuses, Antioch University, Pitzer College, Pace University in New York, and the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria. She was an evaluator and program manager while a ACLS/Mellon Fellow Public Fellow at the LA County Department of Arts and Culture working on the county's Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative. Between 2020 and 2022, Robin was the Community Arts and Culture Programs Co-Director for WE RISE, an initiative sponsored by the LA County Department of Mental Health that supports grassroots programming at the intersection of arts, healing, racial and social justice, as well as a fellow with the Intercultural Leadership Institute. Her performance, curatorial, and artistic practices involve producing and co-curating “Voices in the Water”, a sound installation and meditation on diasporic stories of water among immigrant and working-class communities in McArthur Park, Los Angeles, in collaboration with the Goethe Institute. She also co-curated “Of Soil Seeds and Stars, Meditations on Land, Body, Resistance, and Regeneration,” which was a creative meditation on the possibility of new and generative relationships between ancestral memory, land and bodies, soil, and stars, as an Emerging Curator with LA Contemporary Exhibitions. Robin’s broad research interests speak to her experience as a consultant with various municipal agencies and community-based organizations around issues of arts and equity, cultural production, public history, and in collaboration with first people communities around public art, land access, and land back in Los Angeles. She is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in the Global Studies program, teaching “1492 and beyond.” In the Spring, Robin will teach, “Indigenous Technologies and Climate Change” which will take a comparative approach to explore Indigenous cultural revitalization projects in Hawaii, among California natives, native communities in South Dakota and among the Monacan Indian Nation in Virginia.