Diana Aldrete, Ph.D.
(she/her/ella)
I am a Hartford-based bicultural, bilingual, first-generation Mexican-Salvadoran-American queer abstract visual artist, and professor.
I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but spent a good part of my childhood in Guadalajara, Mexico. As a child, I sat at the kitchen table, the carpet, or my desk, sketching imaginary worlds with a crayon and paper. Even after migrating back to Milwaukee, and then the East Coast, I have always kept “busy,” painting, writing, photographing – teaching myself color theory, educating myself on materials, and learning new techniques.
In my senior year of high school, my art teacher helped me put together a portfolio of my work, which earned the attention of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. However, I chose the academic path, as I earned my Masters in Hispanic Literatures from Marquette University and later my Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from the University at Albany, where I focused on human rights, women’s rights, and Latin American literatures.
My path to becoming an artist has come full circle as I have now merged both of my identities as an academic and an artist in my current position. I worked for seven years as a visiting professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College, and in the Fall 2022, I became an Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights. My research, pedagogy, and artistic production, interrogate the intersections of contemporary Mexican/Latin American/Latinx literary, film and cultural studies, Mexico-U.S. border studies, feminist and queer theory, environmental humanities, and Human Rights studies. I am currently working on my first monographic book project tentatively titled Between Land and Death: Imagining Justice for Women in Mexico, which examines how literary production, primarily by contemporary Mexican women writers, have become part of the political dialectic on anti-feminicidal violence as they question notions of justice, and place literature in conversation with the political.
As an abstract visual artist and writer, I often infuse literary, musical, and cultural references in my visual art and writing. I have published poetry and short fiction, exhibited my visual art in several venues in Connecticut, and had my first solo exhibit Invisible Suffering, at Charter Oak Cultural Center and Austin Arts Center (Trinity College) in the spring 2022. Inspired by activist and water protector Josephine Mandamin, her second art project Ech.o Locations, is a study on the ecologies of the Great Lakes, and the relationships between the contact zones of water, land, and its inhabitants (human and non-human).
As a teacher-scholar-artist, I am informed by theoretical and literary texts, to produce artwork and research that addresses themes of home, belonging, migration, feminism, and human rights. I’m constantly pondering on the negotiations we endure, what we adopt and leave behind, when we migrate into unknown spaces - be they across geographical spaces or social spaces. As an abstract visual artist, I focus on expressing human experience and emotion using different artistic mediums. Through art, I strive to move people to think deeper about the world and understand how they have the power to create change. And ultimately, I am motivated to remind people that we are not static beings that are far removed from the symbolic (art), but how we are constantly operating within the symbolic.