“Miss, you look like a Bratz Doll.”
Dr. Jillian Hernandez is a scholar, community arts educator, curator, and creative. Her work is inspired by Black and Latinx life and imagination, and is invested in challenging how working-class bodies, sexualities, and cultural practices are policed through gendered tropes of deviancy and respectability. She studies Blackness and Latinidad as relational formations and attends to the political, cultural, and communal dynamics of aesthetic production.
Dr. Hernandez received her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Florida at the University of Florida. Her book, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment was published in 2020 by Duke University Press. Her articles have appeared in venues such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, among others. She is also the founder of Women on the Rise!, an insurgent collective of women of color artists who work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Florida. Over the course of a decade, the Women on the Rise! collective engaged thousands of girls in art making and critical dialogues about gender and society through feminist art.
Her practice as a curator has centered on the work of emerging women artists working in performance, photography, and new media. Exhibitions she has curated and co-curated have been on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bas/Fisher Invitational, Maryland Art Place, Space Mountain-Miami, the Welch Galleries at Georgia State University, and other venues.
In 2015, Dr. Hernandez also co-founded the Rebel Quinceañera Collective (RQC) with Yessica Garcia Hernandez and Hilda Gracie Uriarte in San Diego, California. RQC utilized creative expression and informal conversations with high school students to challenge the policing of Latina girls' bodies. She has also engaged youth in community arts through her work as a teaching artist with Artists Mentoring Against Racism, Drugs, and Violence and the Puerto Rican Action Board in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Selected Media Coverage
Amanda Su, Jessica Mendoza
September 2022
Thalia Henao
May 2022
Alicia Eler
September 2022
Thalia Henao
August 2022
Andrea Bossi
October 2022
Beatrice Hazlehurst
June 2021
Commentary: Miami ‘Chonga’ Culture As a Tool of Empowerment
Nicole Martinez
May 2021
Cathy Byrd
April 2021
Paola De Varona
January 2021
Christopher Persaud
November 2020
Jennifer Velez
July 2020
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez
May 2017
Malana Krongelb
April 2017
Stephanie Buck
October 2016
Yessica Garcia Hernandez
September 2016
Julia Jacobs
November 2014
Amy Stretten
March 2014
Isabel Olmos
May 2013
Liz Tracy
December 2011
Hilarie M. Sheets
June 2005
Portraits by Kenya (Robinson)/BLIXEL.co (c) 2022 Bratz Doll portrait by Reinaldo Aristy.