Profile

Elise Y. Chagas studies modern and contemporary art from Latin America with research interests in the relationships between aesthetics, politics, and regimes of value. Her dissertation investigates how art mediated a paradigm shift in early twentieth-century Peru that hinged on a revaluation of the indigenous.

Chagas’ research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Program in Latin American Studies, where she was a Lassen Fellow from 2018 to 2019. She has presented her work throughout the Americas, including at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, The University of The Andes, Bogotá, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima.

In 2021–2022, she was the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Chagas holds an M.A. in art history from the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College and the Clark Art Institute and a B.A. in art history from Northwestern University.