Maíra Vieira de Paula is a Visual Arts Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), from where she also earned her MA in 2018. Her main research topic is the presence and role of photographic appropriation in Brazilian art. Currently, she studies how Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino has appropriated and transformed the materiality, meanings, and effects of the photographic archives of slavery in Brazil. With the early results of this study, she published an essay on Paulino’s works which received an honorable mention at Serrote’s 2020 Essay Contest, one of Brazil’s most renowned magazines in the genre. De Paula was a 2022 alumna of Harvard University’s Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop on Afro-Latin American Studies. She has also won other Graduate Student Travel Awards to present her ongoing Ph.D. research at several academic conferences in the United States, Germany, and France. She is a student affiliate of the Arte&Fotografia Study Group and the Photography Network. Before entering the University of São Paulo, de Paula was a photographer for prominent newspapers and magazines in Brazil and earned a B.A. in Social Communication from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2009.