Biography
Jorgge Menna Barreto, Ph.D., is a Brazilian artist and educator, whose practice and research have been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. In 2014, he worked on a postdoctoral research project at Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, Brazil, where he collaborated with a biologist and an agronomist to study relations between site-specific art and agroecology, focusing on agroforestry. In 2020 he completed a second postdoctoral research fellowship at Liverpool John Moores University, England, which led to the work he presented at the Liverpool Biennial in 2021. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written extensively on the subject. In 2016, he took part in the 32nd São Paulo Biennial with his award-winning project Restauro: a restaurant set up to work with a complex system of environmental restoration in collaboration with settlements of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement [MST]. Since 2015, Menna Barreto has been a professor at the Art Department of Rio de Janeiro State University and is now Assistant Professor at the Art Department of UCSC.