BIO
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor and Graduate Vice Chair at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. His research brings the arts and the social sciences into dialogue, combining critical theory with sustained engagement in aesthetic practice. Working with activists, curators, and artists, Alex investigates how art in community contexts can generate new forms of knowledge, propose alternatives to the utopian, and open up critical perspectives on temporality. Framed by a collaborative methodological approach, his work asks how human beings express themselves artistically, and in doing so, seek to transform the world. His most recent book, Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (Indiana University Press, 2025), explores the temporalities of social transformation through fifteen years of ethnographic engagement with the MST.
Having worked in Brazil since 2007 with the MST and more recently in Mexico, Argentina, and Thailand, Alex’s work increasingly focuses on the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry. This has resulted in exhibitions in Paris (Concrete Mirror, with Noara Quintana), São Paulo (Releituras, with Beatriz Lemos), and most recently at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, where he co-curated Construction, Occupation (2025) with Juliana Caffé and Yudi Rafael. From 2016 to 2017, he was co-curator of the Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency programme based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. For this project, he received the prestigious São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2016 APCA Trophy.
With Lucy Bell and Patrick O’Hare, Alex co-authored the award-winning Taking Form, Making Worlds (University of Texas Press, 2022) and has edited several collections. His work has been translated into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He has taught at Durham University and University College London, and held research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, EHESS Paris, Universidade de São Paulo, and the Iberoamerikanische Institut, Berlin.
Having worked in Brazil since 2007 with the MST and more recently in Mexico, Argentina, and Thailand, Alex’s work increasingly focuses on the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry. This has resulted in exhibitions in Paris (Concrete Mirror, with Noara Quintana), São Paulo (Releituras, with Beatriz Lemos), and most recently at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, where he co-curated Construction, Occupation (2025) with Juliana Caffé and Yudi Rafael. From 2016 to 2017, he was co-curator of the Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency programme based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. For this project, he received the prestigious São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2016 APCA Trophy.
With Lucy Bell and Patrick O’Hare, Alex co-authored the award-winning Taking Form, Making Worlds (University of Texas Press, 2022) and has edited several collections. His work has been translated into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He has taught at Durham University and University College London, and held research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, EHESS Paris, Universidade de São Paulo, and the Iberoamerikanische Institut, Berlin.
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