Mayra Alejandra Cabezas

Biography

Alejandra Cabezas is a Salvadoran museologist, art historian, and curator whose practice spans public history, visual culture, and museum governance. She has led museological and curatorial strategy for seven national museums under the Ministry of Culture of El Salvador, overseeing institutions that collectively welcome more than 1.5 million visitors annually and steward the National Collection of Visual Arts.

Her work focuses on developing institutional frameworks in resource-constrained contexts, including authoring El Salvador's first proposal for national Museum Law and advancing standards in collections documentation, accessibility, and public engagement. Working at the intersection of curatorial research and cultural policy, she translates complex historical and social narratives into exhibitions and interpretive frameworks.

Cabezas is the curator of El Salvador's inaugural national pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, presented at Palazzo Mora through the European Cultural Centre. Her curatorial practice explores displacement, memory, and materiality in contemporary art, with particular attention to how global conditions are experienced through local contexts.

Her recent research, presented at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), proposes new iconographic methodologies for interpreting twentieth-century Central American art, expanding approaches to the region's cosmological and symbolic visual systems.

She has previously worked with the Rijksmuseum and the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, and her research has been published in Aziatische Kunst. She is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and contributes to Ibermuseos initiatives on museum law and museum education.

Cabezas holds a Master of Arts in Museum and Heritage Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a Bachelor of Arts from Mount Holyoke College, where she specialized in archaeology and art history. She has also completed advanced training in intangible cultural heritage management at the Central Academy of Cultural Administration in Beijing and in archaeological field practice through the Balkan Heritage Foundation.

Mayra Alejandra Cabezas Martinez, Curator, El Salvador Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador, has been awarded by the Cader Institute of Central American Art / Instituto Cáder de Arte Centroamericano (ICAC), through a fellowship granted by Fundación Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.