Welcoming Our New Curator Path Research Scientist

During that time, he served as a content specialist on Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery, and expanded the results of his doctoral work on the funerary performances and religious landscapes of the Moche culture, which flourished in northern Peru between the 2nd and 9th centuries CE. From that post, Luis went on to a Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he collaborated on the development of another exhibition, Taming the Desert: Resilience, Religion and Ancestors in Ancient Peru, which will open in November. During his term, he also held the status of Visiting Professor at the UCLA Department of Art History/Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, teaching classes on Andean archaeology and ancient art. He is currently spearheading the Ucupe Cultural Landscape Project in Lambayeque, Peru, a multidisciplinary project that seeks to study the origins of Moche religion in relation to climatic fluctuations in the Andes in the first millennium CE. Luis, who holds a MA and Ph.D. from Stanford University and a BA and Licenciatura from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, is interested in the interface of performance, death, and politics in the ancient Andes, and his work integrates anthropological and performance theory with multi-scalar methods of spatial analysis and absolute dating techniques.
April 26. 2024