Telenovela: A Reader  Book Launch

Art at Americas Society is pleased to present a book launch celebrating the release of Telenovela: A Reader, published by Americas Society in conjunction with the exhibition Telenovela.

The program will feature a panel conversation with the publication’s co-editors Aimé Iglesias Lukin, director and chief curator of Art at Americas Society, and Mariano López Seoane, director of the Graduate Program and ISLAA fellow in Latin American Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, as well as the publication authors Mila Burns, professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College and of History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY); Amy E. Wright, writer, educator, and professor of Hispanic Studies at Saint Louis University; and sociologist and journalist Danila Saiegh. Together, they will discuss the publication’s central themes, research, and the broader questions raised by Telenovela.

Wednesday, September 16, 6–8 PM 
680 Park Avenue, New York, 10065 
Registration is required 
RSVP HERE

The program's recording will be available on this website and on the Art at Americas Society YouTube channel. A reception will close the event.

Telenovela: A Reader, co-edited by Iglesias Lukin and López Seoane, brings together artworks, archival documents, and multidisciplinary essays that examine telenovelas through the lenses of art history, sociology, anthropology, comparative literature, performance studies, and visual studies. Expanding on the themes explored in the exhibition, the publication considers the telenovela as a cultural form that has shaped collective imaginaries across Latin America and its diasporas.

Telenovela: A Reader contributors include Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Mila Burns, Álvaro Cueva, Daniel Link, Samantha Nogueira Joyce, Mariano López Seoane, Cecilia Palmeiro, Omar Rincón, Paul Julian Smith, Rosane Svartman, Liliana Viola, and Amy E. Wright.

Speakers:

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Mila Burns is a professor of Latin American & Latino Studies at Lehman College and of History at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the associate director at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), which investigates the Brazilian influence on the military coup d’état in Chile, in 1973. Burns is also the author of Dona Ivone Lara’s Sorriso Negro (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019; Editora Cobogó, 2021) and Nasci para Sonhar e Cantar: Dona Ivone Lara, a Mulher no Samba (Editora Record, 2009). She holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in history (The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2017), a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies (Columbia University, 2012), a master’s degree in social anthropology (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2006), and a B.A. in journalism (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2003). Mila has an interdisciplinary profile, with an emphasis on history, media, and anthropology. For over two decades, she has worked as a journalist in Brazil and New York. She has served as editor-in-chief and anchor to shows dedicated to the Latino community broadcast at TV Globo International and has contributed to TV Globo, The Economist, O Globo, ICL Notícias, and others. Her articles have been published in several newspapers, magazines, and academic publications. She has two ongoing book projects. The first is about the impact of Brazilian telenovelas in Cuba from the 1980s to the end of Raúl Castro’s administration, in 2021. The other investigates immigration, gender, and family through the diaries of her ancestor, Eulália, who migrated from Spain to Brazil in the late 19th century. Photo credit: Alejandro Castro

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Danila Saiegh is an Argentine sociologist (University of Buenos Aires) and journalist who turned her sentimental education in front of a fourteen-inch television into a field of cultural and feminist inquiry. As co-host of the influential radio show Furia Bebé, she has spent years dissecting Argentine television dramas in her recurring segment, Novelas, Café y Masitas. Winner of the Lola Mora Award, Danila examines melodrama as a country's emotional and political archive. She has recently completed Escenas de un capítulo anterior, a collection of essays on the telenovela that reclaims gossip, domestic life, and romance as legitimate forms of knowledge. Her work unpacks the conventions of the soap opera, the evolution of masculinities, and networks of female friendship on screen, demonstrating how these television productions have historically functioned as unexpected sites of resistance, where fragments of emancipation have been quietly smuggled in, little by little. Throughout her career in the Argentine media landscape, she has contributed to some of the country's leading newspapers and magazines, including Página/12, Revista Anfibia, Diario Perfil, Revista Brando, and Cosecha Roja, where she received an Open Society Foundations reporting fellowship to cover violence and inequality. In her audiovisual work, she created the YouTube series Las Incansables, dedicated to recovering the stories of overlooked women, and co-directed the documentary Mil Historias, un derecho in collaboration with Amnesty International and the Woman Equality Center (WEC).

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Mariano López Seoane is the director of the graduate program and Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) fellow in Latin American Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. A writer, researcher, and curator based in New York and Buenos Aires, he was previously the director of the graduate program on gender and sexuality at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina. He also taught Latin American literature, cultural studies, and queer studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. López Seoane has curated exhibitions and coordinated public programs for ISLAA, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and Art Basel Cities. His latest exhibitions include Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art (2022) and Miguel Ángel Lens: la poesía está en la calle (2023). He has written extensively on contemporary Latin American literature and arts, focusing on cultures of sexual and gender dissidence in the Americas, local inflections of queer studies and queer activism, and figurations of drug culture and drug-related violence in Latin American narratives and visual arts. He is the editor of El lugar sin límites: revista de estudios y políticas de género, a journal devoted to critical examination of current theories and policies on gender and sexuality. His own publications include the volume of essays Donde está el peligro: estéticas de la disidencia sexual (2023) and the novel El regalo de Virgo (2017). Photo credit: Ceilia Glik.

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Amy E. Wright is a writer, educator, and professor of Hispanic Studies at Saint Louis University (SLU), currently serving in an invited position as Whichard distinguished visiting professor in the humanities at East Carolina University. Wright’s scholarship traces Mexico’s long culture of serial storytelling across media—linking nineteenth-century print culture and nation-building prose to popular iconography, radionovelas, telenovelas, film/TV, comics, and podcasts. Her book, Serial Mexico: Storytelling Across Media, from Nationhood to Now (Vanderbilt UP, 2023), recovers the lost history of the Mexican novel from serialized origins to intermedial offshoots; the project earned a National Endowment for the Humanities award (2022) and multiple distinctions that include SLU’s Scholarly Achievement Award and national recognitions for Best Book in the Humanities on the Spanish Speaking World (MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize / LASA Mexico Section Honorable Mentions, 2023-24). Wright has published on Mexico’s early serials (Vanderbilt, 2009), nation-building prose (Cambridge, 2016), popular iconography (MLA, 2019), Mexico’s first comic strip (UNAM, 2022) and legacy of serialized storytelling (Cambridge, 2026). Serial Mexico is slated to appear in Spanish translation in 2026 with Editors Bonilla Artigas (Mexico City), as is Wright’s essay on worldwide traditions of narrative serialization in Routledge Companion to the Novel.