Sarah Estrela

Dr. Sarah M. Estrela is the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Associate on Reparative Art Histories. She earned her B.A. at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, where she double majored in Art History and English Literature. She spent her third year studying at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University as a Benjamin A. Gilman scholar. Estrela completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History at Northwestern University.

Estrela’s research focuses on global modern and contemporary art within African—and especially lusophone—diasporic contexts. She specializes in histories of colonialism, theories of the archive, practices of photography and time-based media, twentieth-century architecture, and feminist art histories. Such work is exemplified in her dissertation, “Diffracting Future Fictions: Visual Resistance in the Portuguese African Liberation Struggles, 1961–1974,” which argues that the artistic careers of Sarah Maldoror, Bertina “Mama B” Lopes, and Malangatana Ngwenya intervened in the visual vocabularies around race and gender that structured mid-twentieth century Portuguese colonial and fascist imagery.

Currently, Estrela is developing a book-length project that considers contemporary artistic and performance-based interrogations of reconstruction, democracy, and the parameters of reparations on multiple scales. This work will focus on artists whose practices challenge concepts of tradition, as well as that of citizenship, in and around the African continent throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Dr. Estrela has worked on multiple internationally touring, loan-based exhibitions and digital humanities initiatives. The most recent among these include the Art Institute of Chicago’s Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (2024) and the Block Museum of Art’s Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa (2019). Her recent course offerings at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have included lectures on African American exhibition history, surveys of African and African diasporic art history, as well as surveys of modern and contemporary art history. As the Mellon Postdoc in Reparative Art Histories, Dr. Estrela looks forward to working alongside Professors Langmead, Savage, Nygren, Kupfer, and Copeland in developing courses based on these topics, alongside this year’s visiting scholarly interlocutors.