Professor Zavala received her PhD in art history from Brown University. She specializes in modern Mexican and contemporary US Latinx art. She is founding co-director of the US Latinx Art Forum, a 501c3 dedicated to the art and art history of the US Latinx community. Her first book Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art, a feminist study of Mexican visual art, won the Arvey Prize from the Association of Latin American Art. Her current work includes a co-authored book about 20^th-century Mexican intellectuals and visual artists who grappled with Mexico City’s Aztec foundations to visualize a modern city informed by colonial maps, manuscripts and archaeological studies. She also writes about Latinx visual art, race and colonialism. Her curatorial projects include Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life for The New York Botanical Garden with the accompanying catalog Frida Kahlo’s Garden.