Ilaria Jessie Obata (she/her) is currently a research associate at the RCMC and holds an MA in Curating Art and Cultures from the University of Amsterdam/Vrije Universiteit, and a BA in History of Art from the University of Leeds.
Her academic and professional research, as both a contemporary art historian and curator, has primarily centred around BIPOC artists, cultural theory, and film studies - as both her curatorial research and writing aims to decentre heteronormative matrixes and socio-cultural tropes. She is interested in exploring the global and local permeances of history; creating space for discussion and institutional change.
Her MA thesis: Curating Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and the Supermarket - explored the shared exhibitionary logic (Bennett, 1995) between the (ethnographic) museum and the supermarket. This theory was explored through three contemporary artists that analyse the supermarket space through the mutually constituted lens of the exhibitionary complex - playing upon the relational dynamic between our everyday consumer spaces and the museum - and the shared ways in which they curate difference, through racial differencing and governance.