Luis C Rincon Alba

Luis Rincón Alba is an artist and scholar whose research focuses on the political and social potential of festive practices across the Americas and the Black Diaspora. He investigates how contemporary and ancestral forms of solidarity are codified, transmitted, and defended through festive performance, expanding modalities of collective study, political thought, and artistic practice. His monograph project, Festive Poetics: Carnivals, New World Performance, and Radical Solidarities, examines how musicians, painters, writers, and performance artists deploy carnival as a vital mode of study unbound from the limitations of the nation-state and forced individuation. Core components of this research appear in journals such as TDR: The Drama Review, Tabula Rasa, and the Journal of Festive Studies. His work establishes a hemispheric framework that bridges performance studies, Black studies, sound studies, and poetics to offer an an-archic framework for political thought that bypasses Western institutional parameters to enact radical modes of collectivity and refusal.

As an artist, writer, and active carnival practitioner, Rincón Alba draws from festive traditions and historical materials encountered in his native Colombia and through immersive engagements across Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, and Brooklyn. His artistic practice spans live performance, sound interventions, film, and multimedia installations—including Chant Down and The Voice Does Go Up—presented at venues such as the Hannah Traore Gallery, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center, Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, and Sovereign Futures. Beyond gallery spaces, his public-facing writing, and art criticism on visual culture, and festive sociality have been featured in institutional publications and catalogs by MoMA, ArteInformado, Dossier Magazine, Nataal, and El País Semanal.

At NYU’s Department of Art & Public Policy, Rincón Alba teaches courses on festive politics, theoretical and aesthetic approaches to war, contemporary art from the Americas, and sound studies. His teaching and writing explore how popular culture and festive performance animate political movements and contemporary artistic practices, with a particular emphasis on how music, dance, literature, and visual art generate alternative frameworks for collective sociality. He also contributes critical commentary and book reviews to outlets like the Hemispheric Institute’s Emisférica Journal, tracing the aesthetic and political genealogies of carnival practices to challenge historical understandings of race, gender, national boundaries, and institutional enclosures.

Luis Rincón Alba has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships in recognition of his scholarship, creative work, and public humanities contributions. He is the recipient of an NYU Goddard Fellowship (2027) supporting his monograph, as well as the Tisch Dean’s Faculty Research Award and Tisch Creative Research Grants. He has held fellowships with NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab and Center for the Humanities, Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, Humanities New York, and the Fulbright Program. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, an M.A. in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook, and a B.A. in Philosophy with High Honors from the Universidad del Atlántico, Colombia.

Educational Background
Ph.D. in Performance Studies, New York University
M.A. in Performance Studies, New York University
M.A. in Philosophy, Stony Brook University
B.A. in Philosophy, Universidad del Atlántico, Colombia