Paula Pontes García

Paula Pontes García is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale. Born in Sesué, a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees, she holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (with Honors – Premio Extraordinario de Fin de Grado), and an M.A. in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture, jointly offered by the Reina Sofía Museum, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has co-created and published in the journal ACTA 9 and collaborated with the research group Artistic Practices and Contemporary Forms of Knowledge (UCM) in the academic journal ACCESOS. In 2024, she received the FPU scholarship, which she held for one year as a researcher in Spain. During this time, she worked as a teaching assistant in the Painting Department at UCM.

Paula’s research explores representations of the Pyrenees mountains, examining how contemporary visual and literary culture can contribute to the construction of a non-sublime narrative of mountain territory. Through this lens, she aims to generate affective imaginaries that resist extractivist logics and acknowledge the cultural and political memory of the land. She is passionate about the relationship between image and text, the role of languages in constructing Pyrenean identities, (counter-) archival practices and studies, environmental humanities and cross-border approaches. Other interests include art practice and practice-based research, conceptual art and performance, and creative writing.