Sean Nesselrode Moncada (he/him) is an historian of art, architecture, and visual culture of the Americas. His research focuses on visual and material modernisms, their uneven implementation across the hemisphere, and their contested social and​ ecological dimensions. He is the author of Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela (University of California Press, 2023), which examines the material, spatial, and theoretical development of Venezuelan modernisms through the lens of petroleum extraction and refinement. 

He has published on subjects including the relationship between art and design in the work of Gego, the politics of midcentury geometric abstraction in South America, and the visual legacies of settler colonialism in contemporary art. He is currently at work on an edited anthology of the poetry of the dissident artist collective El Techo de la Ballena, as well as two forthcoming projects. The first deals with the relationship between Informalism, archaeology, and materiality in 1960s Venezuela; and the second considers ecologies of bodily performance in Venezuelan conceptual and experimental media art of the 1970s–80s. His writings have appeared in journals such as Architectural Theory Review, Caiana: Revista de historia del arte y cultura visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte, Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, and Trópico Absoluto: Revista de crítica, pensamiento e ideas. He is the recipient of the ALAA–Arvey Foundation Book Award (Association for Latin American Art), the Best Book Award in Visual Culture Studies Section (Latin American Studies Association), Honorable Mention for the ALAA Dissertation Award (Association for Latin American Art), and the Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art (International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).

He holds a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is Associate Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he resides in Lënapehòkink, also known as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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