A native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Claudia Mattos Avolese obtained her PhD in art history from the Free University in Berlin, Germany, and was an associate fellow at the Courtauld Institute in London for a year. In 2003 she became a professor for the history of art at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Brazil, where she taught visual culture and art history until moving to the United States in 2019. She was a visiting professor at Harvard University in 2017 and became a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University in 2021. Dr. Mattos Avolese continues to collaborate with the Graduate Program in Art History and Visual Studies at UNICAMP, through a Getty Connecting Art Histories Grant. Her principal areas of interest are visual culture in Brazil, indigenous art, material culture, global art history and theory. Her recent research focuses on indigenous arts in Brazil, the imaginary of the forest and ecology. She has published widely on global exchanges in the 19th century, including scientific expeditions by explorers to Brazil, and the creation and development of art academies in South America. Additionally, she has published on connections between German art theory and 19th century visual culture in Brazil, and on the history of art history with special focus on Winckelmann and Aby Warburg. Her scholarly work has appeared in many peer review journals including, The Art Bulletin, Perspective, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Journal of Art Historiography. Claudia Mattos Avolese was president of the Brazilian National Art History Committee (2013-2016) and is member of the directory board of the International Art History Committee (CIHA).

In 2022-2023 she is a Tisch Faculty Fellow at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. Her project is “Decolonizing the Amazon: reappropriating Marajoara legacy in the Marajó Island. This project relates to a larger one entitled Atlas of Lost Finds directed at promoting reparation and creating new forms of building community and identity for the contemporary “mestizo” population of the Marajó Island and for indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, who are the legitimate hairs to the long-standing indigenous traditions in the region. The project started with the creation of an archive of 3D scanned Marajoara objects (vessels, statuettes, utensils) that were taken away in the 19th and early 20th century to museums in Europe and the US. Using these digital files, the objects were rematerialized at the Marajó island in collaboration with the local community of ceramists. This enterprise brought together high-end technology and ancestral knowledge about ceramics with the end of studying and reappropriating the Marajoara legacy in the region. It also served as opportunity to create an interdisciplinary conversation involving a team of local ceramists, indigenous artists and curators, art historians, archaeologists, and designers to think about new ways of imagining the history of the region in its connections to the Brazilian Rainforest. A last phase of the project is planned to start next spring, when some of the objects created in Marajó will travel to the US and Europe to serve as mediators in conversations about how to decolonize museum collections.