Alex Ungprateeb Flynn

Biography

I hold a joint appointment as Associate Professor in UCLA’s Departments of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Anthropology.

My research brings anthropology, the arts, and critical theory into dialogue through sustained engagement with aesthetic and political practice. Working collaboratively with activists, artists, and curators, I investigate how artistic practices generate forms of knowledge, reconfigure social and political imaginaries, and open up critical perspectives on temporality and transformation. My work asks how people use aesthetic practices to understand the worlds they inhabit and, in doing so, seek to transform them.

My most recent monograph, Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (Indiana University Press, 2025), draws on fieldwork conducted over a fifteen year period with Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) to examine the temporalities through which social transformation is imagined and pursued.

I am also co-editor, with María Iñigo Clavo, Beatriz Lemos, and Florencia Portocarrero, of Unmaking to Make: Art as Decolonising Practice in Latin America’s Future, Past and Present (UCL Press, 2026). Bringing together artists, curators, and scholars from across Latin America, this open-access volume explores how artistic practices engage colonial histories, unsettle established forms of knowledge, and articulate other ways of thinking and making worlds. At its core is the proposition that Latin American artistic practice is not simply transforming the canon but articulating a form of thought in its own right.

For 2026–27, I am a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study inHerit. Heritage in Transformation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where I am developing Ghost Archives, a project exploring ghosts and spirits (ผี / phi) as agents of silenced heritage. Working between contemporary artistic practice, Berlin’s Thai diaspora, and the city’s institutional archives and collections, the project asks how spectral aesthetics and community practice might enable diasporic inheritances to speak differently—haunting the archive, reimagining relations to home, and opening onto futures yet to be.

I have conducted research in Brazil since 2007, and more recently in Mexico, Argentina, and Thailand. My work increasingly explores the intersections between ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry. Curatorial projects include Concrete Mirror in Paris; Cartoneras: Releituras Latino-americanas in São Paulo, with Beatriz Lemos; Construction, Occupation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, co-curated with Juliana Caffé and Yudi Rafael in 2025; and Metamorphosis in Gold, a solo exhibition by Nakrob Moonmanas at Warin Lab Contemporary in Bangkok (2026), which explored contested histories of modernity and civilisation in Thailand through archival research and artistic practice. From 2016 to 2017, I co-curated Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency situated within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. The project received the APCA Trophy from the São Paulo Association of Art Critics.

My research has received substantial funding from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council. At UCLA, I serve on the Global Advisors Council and am affiliated with the Center for Brazilian Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. I am also an affiliated member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

I welcome inquiries from prospective doctoral researchers interested in socially engaged artistic practice, ethnographic research methodologies, expanded curatorial practice, social movement activism, and diasporic aesthetics.