Collaborators
deanna ledezma
Deanna Ledezma, Ph.D. is a Tejanx scholar, writer, and educator specializing in the history and theory of photography, Latinx/e contemporary art and visual culture, and life writing. She is the Postdoctoral Research Associate and Writing Lab Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative (2024–present). Ledezma earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and was previously the Postdoctoral Research Associate of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/UIC Mellon Fellowship Program. She teaches in the Departments of Art History, Theory, and Criticism and Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her current book project Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography examines how Latinxs use photography to negotiate their cultural and diasporic identities, assert their presence amid the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, and commemorate kinship formations, including those disregarded or censured for exceeding conventional ideas of family. Her forthcoming essay on the photographs of Diana Solís will be published in Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships (Rutgers University Press, 2026). Previous publications have appeared in Art Journal, Photography & Culture, caa.reviews, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, The Latinx Project’s Intervenxions and the book Reworking Labor.
In addition to her research- and archive-based scholarship, she is a nonfiction writer and creative practitioner who collaborates with artists on installations, exhibitions, publications, and public-facing events. She wrote introductory essays to Diana Solís’s artist’s book Luz: Seeing the Space Between Us (2022) and the Chicago Public Library exhibition catalog Akito Tsuda: Pilsen Days (2024). Ledezma, Josh Rios, and Anthony Romero co-created the installation Ballad of the Uprooted for the exhibition Re:Working Labor (SAIC Sullivan Galleries, 2019). Continuing their research on the labor conditions of farmworkers, Ledezma and Josh Rios co-authored the essay “Photographs from the Fields: The Digital Activism of the United Farm Workers” in the book Reworking Labor (2023), edited by Ellen Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg.
josh rios
Josh Rios is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches courses in social theory and research-based practice. As a media artist, writer, and educator, he examines the histories, presents, and futurities of Latinx and Chicanx subjects and hemispheric resistance to globalization and neoliberalism, highlighting intercultural contact and co-belonging.
In collaboration with Anthony Romero and Matt Joynt, Rios co-founded Sonic Insurgency Research Group. SIRG was awarded a MAP Fund Grant in 2020. Multimedia works by SIRG have been exhibited in Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Counterpublic Triennial at Luminary Arts (St. Louis), Acoustic Resonance at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art (Portland), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), Work for the People (Or Forget about Fred Hampton) at Co-Prosperity (Chicago). Rios’s other recent projects and performances have been featured at Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO) and the Arts Club of Chicago. His work is included in the group exhibition ASCO: A Call to Response at the Pilsen Arts & Community House through September 2024.
Recent publications include “Photographs from the Fields: The Digital Activism of the United Farm Workers,” co-written with Deanna Ledezma for the book Reworking Labor (2023), “Sonic Legal Spaces: An Essay of Overdubs,” co-authored with Romero and Joynt, for Columbia University’s Academic Commons (2023), and the essay “What is Justice to the Dead? On Sabra Moore’s Reconstruction Project” in the exhibition catalog Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities (2022). In progress publications include “Mythic Sonic Beings” in Situated Listening: Attending to the Unheard (Routledge, 2025) and “Acoustic Geopoetics: Mapping and (Un)mapping Sonic Cartographies of Control” in The Routledge Companion to Visual Studies (2026).
In 2020, Rios was a cohort member of the international artist exchange program with Brazil, Close the There. In 2021, Rios participated in the year-long residency program Re:place, sponsored by Co-Prosperity (Chicago). Ongoing projects include a series of conversations and autonomous study groups about sound, power, and public space sponsored by March: A Journal of Art and Strategy and the Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies (GLASS).
Anthony Romero
Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. He is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College and earned his M.F.A. in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He is a founding member of Sonic Insurgency Research Group with Josh Rios and Matt Joynt. SIRG was awarded a MAP Fund Grant in 2020. Multimedia works by SIRG have been exhibited in Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Counterpublic Triennial at Luminary Arts (St. Louis), Acoustic Resonance at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art (Portland), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), Work for the People (Or Forget about Fred Hampton) at Co-Prosperity (Chicago).
Romero co-edited the book Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic with Daniel Tucker and Dan S. Wang (Soberscove Press, 2022). His most recent essays include “La Vivienda es La Cura: Latinx Art, Politics, and Housing Justice in East Boston” in The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Mey-Yen Moriuchi and Lesley Shipley (2023), and the essay “Sonic Legal Spaces: An Essay of Overdubs,” co-authored with Rios and Joynt, for Columbia University’s Academic Commons (2023). His essay “Asking for Permission/Listening for Consent” (2023) was published in Forging, the digital journal of Forge Project.
As a Boston Artist in Residence (2020–21), Romero worked with the Mayor's Office for Immigrant Advancement. Romero was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2019–20. During his fellowship year, Romero worked on a multimedia research and visual art project that included a collection of related but discrete works that examined how Indigenous populations, under European colonial rule in Australia, South Asia, and the United States, were controlled through the criminalization and legislating of Native sound and music practices.