Michelle Patiño-Flores

Michelle Patiño-Flores is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology with minors in Art History and Museum Studies at UIUC, where she is also an instructor in the Center for Global Studies. As part of her ethnographic research, she learns from and collaborates with Black (and) queer Cuban artists in Cuba and in the diaspora to understand practices of creative freedom in a context characterized by crisis and scarcity. As an artist-scholar, she employs multimodal techniques of photography, craft, and curatorial investigation to collaboratively understand the stakes of political transformation. Her photography recently won 1st place in the Illinois Image of Research 2026 competition. Her work has been exhibited across Illinois and New York. Currently, she is curating her first group exhibit entitled “Crafting Free Communities: Contemporary Cuban Photographers” funded by the 2026 Urbana Arts Grant. She is an alum of the Intersectional Humanities Summer School in Maynooth University, Ireland and is a student editor at American Ethnological Society. She is a 2026-2027 Research Fellow at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), NYC.  Michelle hosts "DISS TRACKS" as DJ PJ at PizzaFM.