PhD Candidate
Geography | University of California, Berkeley
Visual & Cultural Studies, Black & Latinx Geographies, Visual Methodology
Clara Pérez Medina is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and researcher whose work examines the intersections of race, space, and visual culture. Their research and creative practice focuses on how photography, film, architecture, and other visual forms function as spatial technologies that shape belonging, displacement, and urban change in place.
Pairing their art practice with community-based research, they serve as Principal Investigator and Lead Researcher on a number of collaborative projects. These include: Principal Investigator of a UC Berkeley Chancellor-funded audiovisual archive project, in partnership with the La Peña Cultural Center; and Lead Researcher and Curator in the Archive of Urban Futures collective, led by Dr. Brandi T. Summers.
Their work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund, the Foundations for Change Thomas I. Yamashita Prize for Scholar-Activists, and recognized by the Center for Engaged Scholarship, the Citizens & Scholars, and the CAA Professional Development Fellowship in Art History.
Their work bridges public humanities scholarship, art practice, and community-based research.
Racial-Spatial Aesthetics: Racialized Visualities
and the Politics of Space
The power to codify the relationship between racialized space and resources is as much a legislative, economic, and discursive effort to manage racial space as it is visual – this is the heart of my research. My research sits at the intersection of visual and cultural studies, Black geographies, and photographic and film production.
My dissertation, Racial-Spatial Aesthetics: Racialized Visualities and the Politics of Space, shows how cities marshal aesthetic projects—journalistic photography, architecture, film, and design—to delineate belonging and racial difference in space. While critical visual and cultural studies has investigated representational politics—the tropes, narratives, and fantasies embedded within images—this project advances the field by emphasizing the aesthetic techniques and spatial operations of visual artifacts, situating them within Black geographic theories of space, power, and racial capitalism.
I examine how visual artifacts operate not only as representations but as spatial instruments that organize urban life, regulate access to resources, and shape racialized imaginaries of futurity.
My dissertation features a case study of Oakland and Berkeley, California—spanning key turning points in the racial-spatial character of both cities from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Drawing on archival research, visual analysis, and my own photographic and film practice, I read across journalistic photography, architecture, and urban design to trace how racial-spatial constructions have shaped both cities’ divergent yet interconnected histories and cultural legacies.
Across these case studies, Racial-Spatial Aesthetics theorizes racial-aesthetic projects as visual operations that impose racial frames of vision and organization onto urban space. I show how images and aesthetics—whether journalistic, architectural, or participatory—operate spatially to organize urban life, regulate belonging, and imagine racialized futurities, while also illuminating the aesthetic practices through which Black, Indigenous, and diasporic communities reimagine the possibilities of space and collective life.