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Leslie E. Todd is a current PhD candidate in the Art History department at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Her primary field is the art of Colonial Latin America with a focus on colonial Ecuador and her secondary area is Pre-Colombian art history. Her dissertation focuses on wooden polychrome sculpture dating to the second half of the eighteenth century from Quito, Ecuador, a major center for sculpture making in colonial Spanish America. In tandem with social and political unrest triggered by the Spanish Crown’s reform efforts, eighteenth-century Ecuador witnessed a rise in sculptural production and a style that emphasized pleasure and intimacy. Ms. Todd’s dissertation treats sculpture as a meaningful medium and privileges the ownership, reception, production, and style of sculpture destined for private homes as socially and historically powerful entities specific to this period in Ecuadorian history. She examines how sculpture reflected and participated in the ideas and values of society in colonial Quito as it responded to change and unrest.

Ms. Todd received her MA in Art History from the University of Florida, and BA in Spanish and Art History from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her fellowships include a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship for study in Quito, Ecuador, and a four-year Graduate School Fellowship at the University of Florida. She was also a visiting scholar at the Denver Art Museum for two weeks in March 2016 where she accessed the collection of Ecuadorian sculpture in the museum’s reserves. She has also received a Foreign Language and Area Studies award for the study of Brazilian Portuguese and awards for her writing from the University of Florida College of the Arts, poster awards at university-wide and statewide competitions, and a Libby Award for excellence in Art History in the School of Art and Art History.

Macarena Deij Prado is an art history professor at the Instituto Botticelli para el Arte y la Restauración in Cuernavaca, Morelos, México. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Florida and her BA in the same discipline from the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile. Her primary field of study is colonial Latin American art. Her MA thesis focused on seventeenth century Cusquenian painting, especially on the role of a series of paintings on the life of Saint Teresa within the architectural and decorative program of the Saint Teresa Church in Cusco, Peru. Macarena’s primary research goal is to understand works of Latin American colonial art, particularly paintings and altarpieces, in their relationship to one another and in their original context of display within colonial churches.

Mrs. Deij Prado received a two-year Graduate School Fellowship at the University of Florida to pursue her MA. In order to complete her MA thesis, she was awarded with a two-weeks research fellowship from the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, during which she developed archival research in Cusco, Peru. While there, Macarena also developed a comprehensive photographic archive of a selection of Cusquenian churches. Before receiving her MA from the University of Florida she worked for three years as a programming and curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago, Chile, where she focused on research and curatorship of the museum collection and on producing international exhibitions.

Marcela Varona received her Masters Degree in Art History at the University of Florida. Her research field focuses on Spanish Colonial painting in Mexico. In her thesis, she examined the painting Saint Michael Archangel by Luis Juárez from the first half of the 17th century. Her themes of interest include idolatry, creoles, and altarpieces. She also completed a Masters Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and a Bachelors in Fine Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). She has worked in Special Collections at the UTEP Library, the Centennial Museum also at UTEP, and Cultural Heritage at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

During her MA at the University of Florida, Marcela received a Graduate Assistantship and the Latin American Studies Field Research Grant for her thesis research. During her studies at UTEP, she received the Study Abroad Scholarship for Layers of Rome Program and the Vera Wise Memorial Scholarship. She is also an accomplished artist, having received the Sarah and Tom LeaAward for best life painting.