Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities and extractivism, media environments, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is the winner of the 2026-2027 Rome Prize in Environmental Arts and Humanities.
Macarena is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press.
Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She is on the Social Text Collective and is author of dozens of esssays and curatorial events. She is the founding Director of the Center for the Environmental Humanites at Brown at the Cogut Institute, and the founder and director of the Elemental Media Lab (EML) hosted by the Department of Modern Culture and Media.
