Alex Ungprateeb Flynn joins the faculty of UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
UCLA Arts welcomes a new member to the faculty of the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance: assistant professor Alex Ungprateeb Flynn.
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is an anthropologist and curator whose practice explores the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry. Working with social movements and contemporary art practitioners, Flynn’s research investigates the transformative potential of art in community contexts.
He has worked collaboratively on this question in Brazil since 2007 with the Landless Workers’ Movement and more recently in Mexico and Argentina with cartonera publishing. This work has resulted in exhibitions and public programs in Paris (“Concrete Mirror,” with Noara Quintana) and São Paulo (“Releituras,” with Beatriz Lemos).
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Alex Ungprateeb Flynn
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Flynn was co-curator of the Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency program based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. This 15-month project focused on the participatory and open-ended potential of the contemporary art research process, departing from a premise that conceived of the artist as a producer of knowledge and theorising agent. For this project, he received the São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2016 APCA Trophy.
Flynn 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. Flynn’s scholarship has been recognized with British Academy and Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowships, and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge among other awards.
His publications include “Anthropology, theatre and development: The transformative potential of performance” (2015), “The curator, the anthropologist: ‘presentialism’ and open-ended enquiry in process” (2019) and “Returning to Form: Anthropology, Art and a Trans-Formal Methodological Approach” (2019).
Flynn also coordinates FORM*AT, a platform that explores how artistic approaches can prompt a reconceptualization of anthropological theory and practice.
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