Dr. Stephanie Strauss - Faculty Biography
Dr. Strauss is an anthropological art historian with a specialty in the indigenous art, writing, and visual culture of the Americas. She completed her B.A. in Anthropology and Latin American Studies at Yale University and her M.A. in Anthropology with a concentration in Museum Training at George Washington University. She was awarded the Donald D. Harrington Doctoral Fellowship to complete her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.
During her years in Washington, D.C., Dr. Strauss served as a lead project researcher for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s Central American Ceramics Research Project, which culminated in the installation of “Cerámica de los Ancestros: Central America’s Past Revealed,” the first bilingual archaeological exhibition displayed at a Smithsonian Museum. Dr. Strauss’s research focuses on the intersection of hieroglyphic inscription and elite visual culture across ancient Mesoamerica, with a particular interest in how signalling practices and regional semiotics coalesced in the final centuries of the Formative era (ca. 400 BCE to CE 250). Dr. Strauss served as an in-residence Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library from 2019 to 2020 and her scholarship has been supported by a number of other prestigious and competitive fellowships, including Yale University’s Josef Albers Research Award. Most recently, Dr. Strauss was honored to hold the H. and T. King Fellowship in Ancient American Art and Culture through the American Council of Learned Societies (2023 to 2024).
Dr. Strauss has conducted research in both Mexico and Guatemala and has presented numerous conference papers at the annual national meetings of the Society for American Archaeology and the College Art Association. In 2018, she chaired a symposium at the College Art Association annual meeting entitled “Permanence/Impermanence: Materiality in the Precolumbian World,” bringing together experts in the ancient Andes, Mesoamerica, and Central America to discuss ephemerality in the art historical record. Her book project Sculpting the Narrative: The Material Practice of Epi-Olmec Art and Writing, is expected in the Fall of 2026 and her peer-reviewed articles have been published in the academic journals Latin American Antiquity, Ancient Mesoamerica, and World Art, among others.
Dr. Strauss’s pedagogical practice is embedded in decolonizing the art historical canon. Her foundational surveys in Art History are presented from a global perspective and place an emphasis on hands-on learning and visual culture analysis. She has taught global art history and semiotics, the art, archaeology and epigraphy of the Americas, textile design and museum theory, and African art and architecture at the University of St. Thomas-Minnesota, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Southwestern University, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is thrilled to join the faculty of the Department of Art at UTEP as an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Art History.
