Sofia Steinvorth is a German-Costa Rican curator, writer and researcher based in Lisbon. She is the author of Knowledge Production in Visual Arts Organisations: A Case Study on the Triangle Network (2023). Her research and curatorial practice revolve around questions of cultural and curatorial infrastructure as well as artistic practices that develop through collective processes of knowledge production. Representation and mediation are recurring themes in her investigations driven by an interest in the cultural production of the Global South. Drawing on human geography and an interest in the processes that lead to the development of a sense of place, her projects are informed by practices that explore, reveal, and reshape the relations among people and their environments.
Between 2019 and 2020 she was part of CuratorLab - Konstfack's professional curatorial course under the theme "Socially Engaged Curating in Post-Democratic Times" in association with the Visible Project (Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna, Italy). In 2022 she was a curatorial resident at the Bag Factory Artists' Studios in Johannesburg as part of the TURN2 Programme, where she developed the project Many Hands Make Light Work (2022). Currently, Sofia is pursuing her PhD in Artistic Studies: Art and Mediation at the Art History Department of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa with a scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT ). Her research focuses on the art scenes in Mexico City and São Paulo from a curatorial perspective attentive to socio-spatially engaged artistic and curatorial projects that are directly engaged with their localities through community-building processes. Throughout 2024 Sofia is a visiting researcher at the Post-Graduation Programme in Aesthetics and Art History (PGEHA) at USP in São Paulo.
Between 2017 and 2021, she was involved in the production of ELECTRA Magazine, a cultural quarterly published by the EDP Foundation in Lisbon, last as its editorial coordinator. Currently, in collaboration with Carlota Mir and Sara Alberani, she is editing the book Propositions on Translocal Solidarity (forthcoming, Milan and Berlin: Archive Books) as well as South African artist's Phumulani Ntuli's first book in a series of self-archival publications.