Luis Pérez-Oramas


Luis Pérez-Oramas is a Venezuelan poet, art historian and curator. He is the author of eight poetry books, four recollections of essays, as well as numerous art exhibition catalogues. He has contributed as Op Ed author to national newspapers in Venezuela as well as to various literary and art magazines in Latin America and Europe.

Early life

He studied Comparative Literature in Caracas at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, graduating Summa Cum Laude after writing a thesis on the Mexican poet José Gorostiza. Later he pursued his studies in Philosophy and Art History in Toulouse and Paris, receiving a Ph.D from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1994, under the direction of Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch, after completing his doctoral dissertation on Diego Velazquez.

Career

He taught Art History at the University of Rennes 2-Upper Brittany, the Ecole Supérieure de Beaux Arts de Nantes, and the Instituto Superior de Estudios Universitarios en Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, Caracas. He has also taught at the Master Program in Museum Architecture and Museology at the Faculty of Architecture, Central University of Venezuela.
He was member of Grupo Guaire, in Venezuela, and took part at the Taller Calicanto under the direction of the Venezuelan poet Antonia Palacios.
He has organized numerous art exhibitions in Venezuela, Brasil, Europe and the US. In 2011 he was appointed Curatorial Director of the XXXth São Paulo Biennial, which he organized under the title The Imminence of Poetics, an edition extremely well received both nationally and internationally. He worked as a curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 2003 where he held the position of Latin American Art curator between 2006 and 2017. He currently lives and works in New York as an independent curator, art consultant and writer.

Publications

Books – Poetry

Gina Saraceni: En-Obra. Antología de la poesía venezolana 1983-2008, Caracas: Equinoccio-Universidad Simón Bolívar, 2008.
Enrique Andrés Ruiz: Las dos hermanas. Antología de la poesía española e hispanoamericana del siglo XX sobre pintura, Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España, 2011
Syntaxis: una aventura creadora. 30 años del nacimiento de una revista, Santa Cruz de Tenerife: TEA, 2014

Awards

Monteávila Poetry Award 1983.