Ana Catarina Pinho is a researcher, lecturer, and visual artist working at the intersection of photography, visual culture, documentary, and the archive. Her research investigates how photography and archival practices shape cultural memory, with a focus on vernacular image cultures, historiographies of violence, and the visual regimes of propaganda and conflict. She is an Invited Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra, where she teaches photography in the Artistic Studies degree, and a researcher at the Instituto de História da Arte (IHA), Nova University of Lisbon. Her current research project investigates the visual practices of the military in modern warfare, with a particular focus on photography and the politics of visuality that shaped the iconography of the Portuguese Colonial War. Pinho earned her Ph.D. from the European Centre for Documentary Research, University of South Wales, with an international doctoral fellowship from FCT. Her dissertation Transformations of the Real: Reframing archives of the Portuguese dictatorship in contemporary visual arts, examined archival imagery and artistic appropriations within contemporary art practice aimed at challenging the narratives and iconography of the Portuguese dictatorship. Through an intergenerational perspective, her project engaged with the difficult memories of the period and resulting silences, contributing to new forms of critical visual historiography and memory representation.
Her work is grounded in visual culture and the study of the archive and its cultural, political, and aesthetic dimensions. She regularly programmes and curates academic, outreach, and artistic events, having collaborated with several international institutions, including the University of Barcelona (Spain), University of the Arts London (United Kingdom), Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), The Portuguese Center of Photography (Portugal), the Extremaduran and Iberoamerican Museum of Contemporary Art (Spain), and Encontros da Imagem Photography and Visual Culture Festival (Portugal), among others. She is also the founder and convenor of the annual academic conference Reframing the Archive. As an editor, Pinho was the editorial coordinator of the ArchivoZine (2012-2016), a quarterly printed magazine dedicated to photography and documentary. In 2021, she founded and currently serves as Editor-In-Chief the scholarly journal Archivo Papers, and launched the Archivo Press, an independent publisher focused on photography and visual culture. She is also a member of the editorial board of Arte y Sociedad, published by the Universidade Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, and an associate member of the Global Art Archive research project, at the University of Barcelona.
Since 2012, Pinho has been the founder and director of ARCHIVO, an independent research platform dedicated to photography and visual culture that connects theory and practice within visual culture and the arts. She is the founding editor of the scholarly journal Archivo Papersand the convener of the Reframing the Archive international conference. She coordinates the platform's annual programme and promotes the dissemination of both scholarly and artistic work through initiatives such as the Visiting Researcher Programme and the Archivo LAB. She also leads the Archivo Research Network, fostering an international community of researchers and scholars engaged with archival-oriented visual culture, and directs the Archivo Educational Program, which offers both research-based and public activities.
Initially trained in Art and Communication (BA), and specialised in Fine Arts (Painting), she later completed a course in Photography and a Master degree in Photography and Documentary Cinema. Her artistic practice integrates critical, curatorial, and editorial strategies within practice-led research methodologies. Her academic work informs her visual practice, particularly in exploring the discursive frameworks in photography and lens-based media and their relationship to the politics of visuality and memory, while her visual practice serves as an experimental ground for forms of visual knowledge production that, in turn, inform her scholarly inquiry. Examples of this approach include the exhibition The Empire of Fiction (2022), presented at the Extremaduran and Iberoamerican Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC) in Spain, curated as part of her doctoral research, and the book Reframing the Archive (2021), edited within the context of the research symposium cycle she programmed at the Portuguese Center of Photography (2018-2019). Her visual work has been exhibited and published internationally since 2010. Recent engagements include her participation in the XVIII Mediterranean Biennale (Albania) and a commissioned project for the "Peace Videography" research project at Tempere University in Finland.
