Mariana Ortega

Professional Bio

Mariana Ortega’s main areas of research and interest are Women of Color Feminisms, in particular Latina/x Feminisms, Critical Phenomenology, Philosophy of Race, and Aesthetics. Her research focuses on questions of self, identity, and relationality as well as visual presentations of race, gender, and sexuality. Her latest book, Carnalities, The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke University Press, 2025), examines the role of creative practices, specifically photography, for the purposes of transformation, memorialization, and mourning in the context of Latinidad. She is author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (SUNY, 2016), in which she presents a theory of multiplicitous selfhood informed by Latina/x feminisms and Heideggerian phenomenology. She is co-editor with Andrea Pitts and José Medina of Theories of the Flesh, Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020); and co-editor with Linda Martín Alcoff of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY, 2009). Her recent co-edited anthology with Helen Fielding, Life in Art, Phenomenology and Worldmaking, is forthcoming with Indiana University Press. Her new research project examines the nexus of aesthetics and memory-making in an anticolonial register. She is the founder and director of the Latina/x Feminisms Roundtable, a forum for Latina/x and Latin American feminisms.