Photo by William Camargo
Joseph Valencia is a curator, educator, and writer engaging with both contemporary art and the history of art, design, and visual culture. He is Curator of Exhibitions at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College, where he also teaches in the Museum Studies Certificate Program.
A scholar of Latinx art with a research background in California and the hemispheric Americas, he has curated exhibitions such as We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro (2024-2025), Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art (2022), and Liberate the Bar! Queer Nightlife, Activism, and Spacemaking (2019). He is currently co-curator and co-editor of Ofelia Esparza: A Retrospective, a major exhibition and publication celebrating the Chicana artist whose work helped bring Mexican altar-making and Día de los Muertos traditions into the American mainstream.
He previously served on the curatorial team for Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell (2017-2021), the critically acclaimed survey of the Chicana photographer, and its related series Cuerpos Unidos: Performances in Dialogue with Laura Aguilar (2018). Other projects include solo exhibitions by Los Angeles artists such as Phung Huynh, Patrick Martinez, noé olivas, Guadalupe Rosales, Gabriela Ruiz, and Kang Seung Lee.
Valencia was born in Orange County, California, and raised in a Mexican and Chicano household. His family’s roots in Orange and the El Modena barrio, dating back to the early 1900s, continue to guide his work as a curator, educator, and writer, amplifying underrepresented voices and histories in the arts.
He holds a Master’s degree from USC and a Bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fullerton.