Juliana Mendonça do Vale

Biography

Juliana Mendonça do Vale is a researcher at Pinacoteca de São Paulo. With an emphasis on contemporary art and its historical context within exhibitions and cultural institutions, she works closely with the museum's collection, researching, cataloguing, reviewing, and documenting artworks. In 2019, she earned her degree in Visual Arts, specializing in Printmaking, from the University of São Paulo (USP), and she completed her master’s in Museology at the same institution in 2024.

For her Master’s research, Juliana explored the reception and documentation of performance art in Brazilian museums between the 1960s and 1980s, using a comparative approach that included the Pinacoteca and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. She analyzed how institutional decisions, acquisition strategies, exhibition planning, and documentation methods, particularly those shaped by figures such as Walter Zanini, Aracy Amaral, and Fabio Magalhães, contributed to the recognition of performance art as an artistic form. Her research also highlighted the need for specialized protocols to manage time-based and ephemeral artworks.

At the Pinacoteca, Juliana develops projects that connect documentation with broader collection research. In 2025, she contributed to research and documentation of exhibitions based on the museum’s collection and participated in organizing the international seminar titled Identities and Life Stories in Museum Collections, held at the Pinacoteca with the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art.

She also wrote the essay Between Temple and Forum: A Museum in Dialogue with the Present forthcoming in December in the commemorative volume "Pinacoteca de São Paulo: 120 Years" (Act Editora). That same year, she contributed to the Guide for the Preservation of Performance Artworks in Brazilian Public Museums (IBRAM/UnB), providing a case study on Pinacoteca's documentation practices. In 2024, she conducted provenance research for the exhibition Lygia Clark: Project for a Planet.

Juliana Mendonça do Vale, Researcher at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, in São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation.