Assistant Professor of Art History
Marisa C. Sánchez is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lycoming College where she directs the art history program. As an art historian and curator, her teaching and research interests focus on modern and contemporary art, feminist art histories, art historical methodologies, curatorial practices, museum culture, and the artist interview. Her interdisciplinary approach engages the history of art and counter-narratives, which broadens the scope and understanding of the study of artists and their work.
Prior to joining the faculty of Lycoming College in the fall of 2023, Sánchez was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Research and Scholarly Engagement at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. During her fellowship, she researched the permanent collection and the museum’s history, curated the exhibition Time and Tide Flow Wide: The Collection in Context, 1959–1973, and taught art history.
Sánchez received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada in 2019 where her dissertation, The Beckett Effect: The Work of Stan Douglas, Paul Chan, and Tania Bruguera, examined Beckett’s discursive reverberations within these artists’ visual practices, locating the “Beckett Effect” as politically and artistically significant in contemporary art. She has presented papers on her dissertation topic at Conferences including the College Art Association, Samuel Beckett Society, and Modern Language Association. She has also published on her topic including “Foucault’s Beckett” in Michel Foucault: les arts & les letters/arts & humanities in the 21st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Her interview with artist Stan Douglas appeared in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art, edited by Robert Reginio, David Houston Jones, and Katherine Weiss (Ibidem Press, 2017).
She has taught art history as Sessional Faculty at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and Okanagan campuses, and at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She has also served as an advisor to second shelf, a collaborative book acquisition project, initiated by Heide Hinrichs at the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp, dedicated to expanding library holdings of publications by artists and scholars from historically excluded groups. In conjunction with second shelf, Sánchez presented a talk at the Academy entitled “Towards a Feminist Practice: Notes on Listening” and her essay on this topic was published in shelf documents: art library as practice (2021).
Prior to her doctoral studies, Sánchez was Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, where she curated exhibitions, including love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death – Andy Warhol Media Works, and solo projects with artists Sandra Cinto, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Corin Hewitt, Heide Hinrichs and Mika Tajima. For the museum, she was Co-Curator with Cécile Debray on the exhibition Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou (2012). Before this curatorial position, she was Curatorial Assistant to Anne Wilkes Tucker in the Photography Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where Sánchez curated Two Women Look West, among other photography exhibits drawn from the permanent collection. She also holds an MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she wrote her thesis, Globe Trotting: Gabriel Orozco’s Global Nomadism.