Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla

Trained in curatorial studies, Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla holds a PhD in contemporary art history from the University of Rennes 2 (France). She specializes in the history of exhibitions—her PhD dissertation highlights a history of the uses of postcolonial theories by curatorial practices in contemporary art since the 1980s until 2015. Her current research concerns museum acquisition policies in the global era and the strategies to decolonize institutional practices, particularly through collaborations, both in the West and in former colonized areas. She published on these topics in Muséologies, On Curating and Critique d’art, and coedited the dossier 24 of TSANTSA, Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association, on decolonial processes in Swiss academia and cultural institutions.

Her last editorial project, Constellations subjectives : pour une histoire féministe de l’art, coedited with Émilie Blanc, Johanna Renard and Elvan Zabunyan (Éditions iXe, October 2020), is a book of collected papers on feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches, both theoretical and artistic, in contemporary art. It especially includes translations into French of authors such as Griselda Pollock, Katy Deepwell, María Galindo from Mujeres Creando, María Dalida Benfield and the Diásporas Críticas.

In September 2020 she joined the Visual Arts Department at the HEAD - Geneva. Previously she taught at University of Rennes 2, where she was involved in the Curatorial Studies Master program, and did her post-doctoral research at the University of Basel where she taught at the Urban Studies Department and at the Seminar of Social Anthropology.

In the Work.Master Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla is a Seminar Teacher and Theory/Thesis tutor.