Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor and Graduate Vice Chair at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Alex’s research sits between the arts and the social sciences, between cultural theory and aesthetic practice. Working with activists, curators, and artists in Brasil, Alex investigates the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts to theorize the production of knowledge, notions of utopia, and social and aesthetic dimensions of form. Framed by a collaborative methodological approach, Alex fundamentally inquires how human beings express themselves artistically, and in doing so, seek to transform the world.

Having worked in Brasil since 2007 with the Landless Workers’ Movement and more recently in Mexico and Argentina with cartonera publishing, Alex’s work has increasingly focused on the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry, resulting in exhibitions in Paris (Concrete Mirror, with Noara Quintana) and São Paulo (Releituras, with Beatriz Lemos). From 2016 to 2017, Alex was co-curator of the Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency programme based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. For this project, Alex received the prestigious São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2016 APCA Trophy.

With Lucy Bell and Patrick O’Hare, Alex is the author of the award winning book ‘Taking Form, Making Worlds’ (University of Texas Press, 2022) and his work has been translated to French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Alex has taught at Durham University and University College London and held research positions at the University of Cambridge, EHESS, Paris, Universidade de São Paulo, and the Iberoamerikanische Institut, Berlin.