Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies

Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies

Sabrina Moura is a Brazilian art historian, curator, and researcher whose work examines the histories of art, museums, and exhibitions across Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world. She is Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies in the Department of Humanities at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, where she teaches and supervises graduate research in art history, museum studies, and visual culture. Prior to joining Global Studies University, she headed the Research Section at Louvre Abu Dhabi, leading the museum's research initiatives, fellowship programme, academic partnerships, and scholarly publications. 

Before relocating to the United Arab Emirates, Moura was a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she curated the exhibition Travelling Back: Reframing a Munich Expedition to Brazil in the 19th Century (2024). She was previously a visiting researcher at Columbia University through the Getty Foundation's Connecting Art Histories programme and conducted research in the collections of the Museu Nacional da República in Brasília, sponsored by UNESCO, which led to the curatorship of the exhibition Aqui Estou (2023). 

Moura is the author of Arqueologia da Criação (2022), a study on the work of Brazilian artist Rossini Perez, founder of the first printmaking workshop in Dakar in the 1970s, and the editor of Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for Other Geographies of Thought (2015), a volume examining historical perspectives on artistic exchanges in the Global South. Her writings have appeared in Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, Stedelijk Studies Journal, African Arts, Critical Interventions, and Third Text Africa, among others. 

She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Campinas (Brazil). Her research and curatorial projects have been supported by the Getty Foundation, Pro Helvetia, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), the Regional Council of Île-de-France, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), among others.

Research

Her research interests include Global South studies, African art history, Latin American art history, museum studies, exhibition histories, the politics of memory, the geopolitics of knowledge, artists’ archives, heritage studies, the global history of museums, and artificial intelligence in the humanities.

Selected Publications

  • Moura, Sabrina, and N’Goné Fall, eds. “Visual Art Biennials in Africa.” Special issue of OBOE: Journal on Biennials and Other Exhibitions (forthcoming 2026).
  • Moura, Sabrina. “Albert Frisch and the Representation of the Body in Visual Narratives of Early Amazonian Photography.” In Nomadic Camera: Photography, Displacement and Dis:connectivities, edited by Burcu Dogramaci, Winfried Gerling, Jens Jäger, and Birgit Mersmann. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2026.
  • Moura, Sabrina. “Distance.” In Dis:connectivity in Processes of Globalisation: Concepts, Terms and Practices, edited by Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci, and Roland Wenzlhuemer, 101–6. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.
  • Moura, Sabrina. “Visualizing Historical and Contemporary African Diasporas: A Perspective from the Dakar Biennial.” In The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History, edited by Eddie Chambers. Routledge, 2024.
  • Moura, Sabrina. “Pedagogies and Artistic Practices at the École de Dakar: A Brazilian Perspective.” 3rd Text Africa, no. 13 (2023): 164–77.
  • Moura, Sabrina. Arqueologia da Criação: Uma Imersão no Acervo-Ateliê de Rossini Perez. São Paulo: Edições Vasto/Mireveja, 2022.
  • Moura, Sabrina. “O retorno à ilha-memória: Imagens e histórias de Gorée entre os artistas da diáspora africana.” MODOS: Revista de História da Arte 6, no. 1 (2022): 564–82.
  • Moura, Sabrina. “The Museum of Black Civilisations, between History and Utopia.” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 15, no. 2 (2021): 107–22.
  • Moura, Sabrina. “The Cultural Politics of Négritude and the Debates around the Brazilian Participation in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, 1966).” In New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms, edited by Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg, 164–77. New York: Routledge, 2021.
  • Moura, Sabrina, ed. Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for Other Geographies of Thought. São Paulo: Edições SESC, 2015.

Selected Curatorial Projects

  • Moura, Sabrina, curator. Travelling Back: Reframing a Munich Expedition to Brazil in the 19th Century. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, Germany, 2024.
  • Moura, Sabrina, curator. Aqui Estou: Corpo, Paisagem e Política no Acervo do Museu Nacional da República. Museu Nacional da República, Brasília, Brazil, 2023.
  • Moura, Sabrina, curator. Arqueologia da Criação. Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo, Brazil, 2021.
  • Moura, Sabrina, curator. Nome Próprio. Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2019.
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