Alex Ungprateeb Flynn

Associate Professor
Department: World Arts & Cultures/Dance
auflynn@arts.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Art, Brazil, Social anthropology , Social Justice

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor and Graduate Vice Chair at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Working collaboratively with social movements and contemporary art practitioners, Alex’s practice explores the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts, prompting the theorization of fields such as the production of knowledge, temporality and utopia, and the social and aesthetic dimensions of form. Having worked in Brazil since 2007 with the Landless Workers’ Movement and in Mexico and Argentina with cartonera publishers, Alex’s work has increasingly focused on the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of enquiry, resulting in exhibitions and public programs in Paris (Concrete Mirror, with Noara Quintana) and São Paulo (Releituras, with Beatriz Lemos). From 2016 to 2017, Alex was co-curator of the Cambridge Artistic Residency (CARe), an artistic residency program based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. For this project, Alex received the São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2016 APCA Trophy. Alex has taught at Durham University and University College London and held research positions at the University of Cambridge, EHESS Paris, Universidade de São Paulo, and the Iberoamerikanische Institut, Berlin. He is the author of Taking Form, Making Worlds (University of Texas Press, 2022) and Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (forthcoming with Indiana University Press).