Biography

Foto de Laura Beltrán-Rubio

Dr. Laura Beltrán-Rubio is an international speaker, award-winning researcher, writer, curator, and creative consultant. She received her Ph.D. from William & Mary (Williamsburg, VA) and an M.A. in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design (New York). With more than a decade working in different spaces within the art and design world, Dr. Beltrán-Rubio’s mission is to expand the narratives of art and design to create more diverse, equitable, and socially just societies.

Dr. Beltrán-Rubio’s work explores the construction and performance of identities through artistic expression, with a broad interest in global Indigenous arts and fashion. More specifically, it analyzes the endurance and importance of Indigenous ways of knowing in the development of fashion and textile arts in the Americas from the early colonial period to the present-day.

Dr. Beltrán-Rubio is a big proponent of decolonizing the arts, including art history, theory, and criticism. Her passion is to share the diverse histories of art and design with wide-ranging, multilingual audiences. She has thus assumed the role of a “public-facing scholar” to generate wider and more accessible conversations around the arts. Her open-access, digital projects include the educational platform Culturas de Moda, the podcast Salón de Moda, and the digital companion to her book Imperio de Moda (in progress). Dr. Beltrán-Rubio has also worked at The Fashion and Race Database since 2020 and is currently Senior Researcher.

Dr. Beltrán-Rubio’s interest in curatorial practice began with internships at El Museo del Barrio and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. More recently, in 2020, she was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Seminar in Curatorial Practice. She is currently curating a handful of exhibitions in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.

Dr. Beltrán-Rubio has taught at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), Parsons, and William & Mary. She has been a guest lecturer at several other institutions and frequently speaks at conferences and symposia around the world. Previously, she was editorial apprentice at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC) and graduate assistant at the Digital Equality Lab.

Dr. Beltrán-Rubio has been the recipient of multiple scholarships, awards and fellowships. In 2014, she received a scholarship from Colfuturo to finance her M.A. studies. In 2018, she received the Dean’s Recruitment Fellowship at William & Mary. Her studies and research have also been funded by the Department of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, William & Mary, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Costume Society of America, the Decorative Arts Trust, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Dr. Beltrán-Rubio’s work has been published in scholarly journals, the popular media, and exhibition catalogs. Peer-reviewed scholarly journals featuring her writing include Fashion Theory, The Journal of Dress History, and Miradas. The book Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen (2022, ed. Emma Cormack and Michele Majer), to which she contributed an essay on the Viceroyalty of New Granada, was featured among The New York Times best art books of 2022 and won an Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) Award for Excellence in 2023.