The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

Larissa Nez (Diné) is of the Mud People and born for the Mountain Cove People. Her maternal grandfather is of the Red Running into the Water People and her paternal grandfather is of the Big Water People. She was born and raised in Diné Bikéyah (Navajo Nation).

Larissa is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, at the University of California, Berkeley. Centering critical Indigenous theory, decolonial theory, and the Black Radical Tradition, her research explores the relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity. Larissa seeks to articulate the ways resistance and survival, kinship and belonging, memory and futurity are intrinsic to the world-making that comes about due to, and in spite of, the world-breaking of colonial and imperial violence. Focusing on the work of modern and contemporary Afro-Indigenous, Black, and Indigenous visual artists and filmmakers, her research shows how Afro-Indigenous, Black, and Indigenous artists and communities are imagining and building worlds and futures that are dialectically and intimately connected to the past and present, land/water/sky and body, and the material and spiritual.

Larissa is currently the Borderlands Curatorial Fellow with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School. She is also currently serving on the Advisory Council for the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame and the Artist Initiatives Committee with Creative Capital.

Recent Publications

Nez, Larissa. “Body, Spirit, and Land: Critical Indigenous Theory Imagined by Sky Hopinka.” you are here: the journal of creative geography, no. 25, August 2024, pp. TBD. School of Geography, Development & Environment, University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/665435.  

Nez, Larissa. “Reuniting and Returning: Balancing our Universe through Weaving,” In Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles, edited by Dr. Hadley Jensen. Santa Fe, NM: Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and Museum of New Mexico Press, June 2024.

Nez, Larissa. “Indigenous Cultural Revitalization: Notes on rematriation and preservation,” Arts of the Working Class, 1, no. 27 (July 2023): 40-41. https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/edition/arts-of-the-working-class-27.

Nez, Larissa, Brianna Nez. Dyeing & Coloring and Homeland, Creation, & Cosmology Educator Guides, for Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest exhibition, Bard Graduate Center, 2023.

Nez, Larissa. “Indigenous Power in Public Places,” In Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: A Retrospective, edited by Beth Huseman. New York, NY: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023.

Education

M.A., University of California, Berkeley, May 2024
Ethnic Studies

M.A., Brown University, May 2022
Public Humanities

B.A., University of Notre Dame, May 2019
Art History
Minor in Sociology

Courses Taught

Muslims in America (Fall 2o24)
Professor Hatem Abazian