MONICA HUERTA
critic • curator • creatrix
For collaborations, invitations, and inquiries:
Monica Huerta is a critic, curator, scholar, and editor. She works across mediums to amplify freer futures and the courage to make them real. Alongside visionary makers, she learns from minoritarian histories of sensing the world otherwise to unearth new possibilities in the present.
Her current projects explore contemporary Latinx photography, anticapitalist fairy tales, and the art of sports. Essays appear in ArtForum, Society + Space, Intervenxions, Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries, Women & Performance, and many peer-reviewed academic journals.
With media theorist, Ava Shirazi, she founded the::sense::archive in 2023 as a curatorial experiment centering artists’ practices to un-learn and remake aesthetic inquiry. After that, we let morphing sensoria take the lead. Together, they are curating exhibitions of archivally-based contemporary art for the Princeton University Art Museum (Spring 2026) and the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College (Spring 2027).
Monica is the author of two books. Most recently, The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (2023) tells a new story about how race and photography shaped early intellectual property law. The book is glowingly reviewed in Art Journal, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Lambda Literary Review, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Her first book, Magical Habits, was deemed a “striking debut” by the New York Times Book Review. The book is an example of hybrid criticism interested in what Saidiya Hartman calls “undoings of the plot.” Orbiting a childhood spent in Chicago’s Mexican restaurants, and written in distinct genres - fiction, personal essay, fairy tale, criticism - the book experiments what knowledge-making might become. Magical Habits won a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and received rave reviews from ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, Library Journal, MELUS, Foreword, Lateral Journal, and many others.
In support of authors seeking new forms for new thoughts, Monica is a member of the editorial collective for the Duke University Press series, Writing Matters! The series is rigorously undisciplined, seeking to publish research-based, field-shifting works that expand the tone, reach, claims, and attitudes of conceptual critical writing.
She teaches at Princeton University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Duke University. She has also taught at Rutgers University, Pace University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the Técnologico de Monterrey in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her work has been generously supported by the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the New York Public Library, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, an M.A. from Princeton, and a B.A. from Harvard.
With media theorist, Ava Shirazi, she founded the::sense::archive in 2023 as a curatorial experiment centering artists’ practices to un-learn and remake aesthetic inquiry. After that, we let morphing sensoria take the lead. Together, they are curating exhibitions of archivally-based contemporary art for the Princeton University Art Museum (Spring 2026) and the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College (Spring 2027).
Monica is the author of two books. Most recently, The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (2023) tells a new story about how race and photography shaped early intellectual property law. The book is glowingly reviewed in Art Journal, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Lambda Literary Review, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Her first book, Magical Habits, was deemed a “striking debut” by the New York Times Book Review. The book is an example of hybrid criticism interested in what Saidiya Hartman calls “undoings of the plot.” Orbiting a childhood spent in Chicago’s Mexican restaurants, and written in distinct genres - fiction, personal essay, fairy tale, criticism - the book experiments what knowledge-making might become. Magical Habits won a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and received rave reviews from ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, Library Journal, MELUS, Foreword, Lateral Journal, and many others.
In support of authors seeking new forms for new thoughts, Monica is a member of the editorial collective for the Duke University Press series, Writing Matters! The series is rigorously undisciplined, seeking to publish research-based, field-shifting works that expand the tone, reach, claims, and attitudes of conceptual critical writing.
She teaches at Princeton University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Duke University. She has also taught at Rutgers University, Pace University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the Técnologico de Monterrey in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her work has been generously supported by the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the New York Public Library, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, an M.A. from Princeton, and a B.A. from Harvard.