Mirzam Pérez

Mirzam Pérez (she/ella) is an artist-scholar who explores questions of place and belonging through fabric and paint. As Professor of Spanish at Grinnell College, her research bridges seventeenth-century theater, visual culture, and digital humanities with an active contemporary studio practice in painting and sculpture. She is the author of The Comedia of Virginity: Mary and the Politics of Seventeenth-Century Spanish Theater (Baylor University Press, 2012), and numerous articles on theater, festival culture, and pedagogy.

Pérez’s project at DRCLAS examines the visual legacy of corporate imperialism through the United Fruit Company Photograph Collection at the Baker Library at Harvard. Drawing on visual culture studies, critical archival theory, and her own studio practice, she analyzes how corporate photography constructed narratives of labor, land, and modernization that obscured exploitative conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean. This research informs both a forthcoming body of artwork and an undergraduate seminar in which students engage in archival analysis and creative responses to histories of corporate image-making.

Pérez is completing a Master of Fine Arts from Maharishi International University (expected January 2027) and holds a PhD from Tulane University (2009). Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. She exhibits nationally and internationally.