Yafrainy Familia is an interdisciplinary scholar of Caribbean and Latinx cultural studies, transnational feminisms, and critical geography.
Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century Caribbean and Latinx art and visual culture; literary studies; Black and brown feminist geographies; gender and sexuality studies; curatorial practices; and digital humanities.
An Assistant Professor of Spanish and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she was an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She also holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Professor Familia’s book in progress, Sites of Freedom: Caribbean Art, Gender and the Politics of Space, examines feminist and decolonial approaches to space in 20th and 21st century visual cultural production from the Caribbean and its diasporas. Through the analysis of painting, photography, collage, artist interviews, and archival sources (including cartographic maps and architectural plans), this project considers how Caribbean and diasporic artists grapple with different sites where racial-sexual oppression materializes. More important, it examines how these artists use their creative practices to offer a reparative visual grammar that imagines and builds spaces of freedom. In doing so, this work attends to the central role of contemporary arts in visualizing – and actively transforming – Caribbean women’s interrelated struggles for gender equity, racial justice, and geographic liberation.
Professor Familia’s work has been supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, among others. Her academic and critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and the exhibition catalogue of Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People, an art exhibit she helped organize as a Solidarity Fellow in the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded digital humanities and community-engaged project supporting solidarity work in Black and ethnic studies.