معرفی
Dr. Verónica Tello is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the School of Art & Design, University of New South Wales (UNSW), where she also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art. She is the Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council project Parallel Structures (2021-2025), which critically engages with diversity and inclusion discourses in Anglo-Australian art museums through para-institutional curatorial practices developed in partnership with the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA).
Dr. Tello earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Melbourne in 2014, following a BA (Honours) in Art History from the same institution. Her academic journey includes a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UNSW (2015-2018) and a PLuS Alliance Research Fellowship.
Dr. Tello's research spans Latin American and global art historiography with particular focus on queer methodologies, diasporic art practices, and archival research. Her work examines how art and curatorial practices respond to historical trauma, particularly in contexts of displacement and authoritarian regimes. She has developed significant expertise in Chilean conceptual art during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), analyzing how artists created transnational exhibition circuits that documented art's globalization under neoliberal economic systems. Her research also explores Oceanic and South Pacific art histories, time and memory studies through queer and decolonial frameworks, and border studies in transnational contexts.
Her scholarly publications demonstrate a consistent engagement with refugee histories, counter-memorial aesthetics, and the politics of contemporary art. Recent work has increasingly focused on para-institutional practices that challenge traditional museum structures while advancing structural change through collaborations with diasporic and Indigenous communities. The thematic threads connecting her research include diaspora studies, decolonial theory, queer temporalities, transnational art networks, and critical museum studies.
Dr. Tello has received significant research support including:
- Australian Research Council Linkage Project (2021-2025) as Lead Researcher for Parallel Structures
- UNSW Sabbatical Research Grant (2023) for An Archive of Neoliberalism; A History of Contemporary Art (1973-)
- UNSW Art & Design faculty research development grant (2022-2021)
- Creative Australia Individual Project Grant (2019)
- PLuS Alliance Research Fellowship (2019)
- Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UNSW (2015-2018)
As a dedicated supervisor, Dr. Tello chairs panels and supervises graduate students working on diverse topics including diasporic, decolonial, trans, and queer curatorial and artistic methodologies in Australian, Asian, and Latin American contexts. Her current PhD candidates explore Filipinx contemporary art, world-making strategies in Australian curatorial practice, and queer histories through para-fiction. She has successfully guided numerous students to completion, with research focusing on labor in poster collectives, insomniac aesthetics, decolonialization in contemporary Australian art, and fugitive subjectivity in essay-films.
Dr. Tello leads the curatorial research project Parallel Structures in collaboration with Salote Tawale and Ien Ang, working with diasporic and Indigenous researchers and curators to develop 'para-institutional' approaches that work alongside rather than within traditional museum structures. This project represents a significant contribution to experimental museum studies and diversity initiatives in the Australian art sector.
