María Isabel Téllez Colmenares

María Isabel Téllez Colmenares is a Ph.D. student in the RASC/a: Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture program at SMU. She is an art historian and artist specializing in cultural projects, having graduated from the Universidad de los Andes, and holds a master's degree in Museum Studies and Heritage Management from the National University of Colombia. In recent years, she has worked at the Museum of the Universidad del Rosario and the Museums Colonial and Santa Clara, and she has been involved in several projects around the research and the dissemination of Colombian colonial art and heritage. Her research focuses on the portraiture of New Granada and the material culture depicted therein, analyzing these pictorial representations as displays of power by the elites of that period. She also seeks to critically examine the formation of museums that house colonial artifacts in their collections, as well as the dynamics currently at play within these institutions.