Alivé Piliado-Santana is a curator, arts administrator, and writer working between Chicago and Mexico City. She currently serves as the ALAM Curatorial Associate at the National Museum of Mexican Art, as part of the curatorial cohort for the Advancing Latinx Art in Museums, a national initiative supported by the Ford, Getty, Mellon, and Terra Foundations. Her previous institutional roles include serving as a Research Associate in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she co-curated Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds (2025) and contributed to the research and catalogue for Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (2023). In Mexico City, she served as curator at the Museo Nacional de San Carlos and oversaw the 20th-century collection at the Museo Nacional de Arte. Her curatorial work has also extended to exhibitions on modern Mexican art in Argentina, Chile, and France.

Alivé’s current practice engages with contemporary Latine artists whose work resists fixed narratives of transnationalism and instead navigates the aesthetics and politics of diaspora, identity, language, migration, and nostalgia. She recently curated storefront into chicagoacán (2024), a solo exhibition by Leticia Pardo at SITE Galleries.

She has presented her research and curatorial projects at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Casa Wabi, the College Art Association, Loyola University Chicago, UNAM, and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. Her writing has been published by the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Fundación Sebastián, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de México, and Letras Libres.

Image: Installation view of Leticia Pardo's storefront into chicagoacán, SITE Galleries, 2024. Image credit: Mikey Mosher

Headshot: Juan Olvera