Emmanuel Ortega (PhD, Art History, University of New Mexico) is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library for 2022-2023. As a scholar and curator, Ortega has lectured on images of autos-de-fe, 19th-century Mexican landscape painting, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. His writings include "The Mexican Picturesque and the Sentimental Nation: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Landscape," (The Art Bulletin, 2021) and his book project, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission (under contract with Routledge). He is a recurrent lecturer for Arquetopia Foundation for Development, the largest artist residency in México.