An art historian, curator, and editor specializing in Latino and Latin American art, Roberto Tejada was born in Los Angeles. He earned a BA in comparative literature from New York University and a PhD in interdisciplinary media studies from the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Gift & Verdict (1999) and Amulet Anatomy (2001) as well as the full-length collections Mirrors for Gold (2006) and Exposition Park (2010).

Written while Tejada was living in Mexico City, Mirrors for Gold explores the borders of culture, romance, and the history of Latin America. In a 2009 interview with Dale Smith for Viz., Tejada noted: “In Mirrors for Gold I was interested in how the relationship between self and other, in a psychoanalytic sense, can point back to the violent encounter between the conquistador and native American—who’s conquering whom and how are those power differentials established in a palpable historical sense, and what kinds of fear and fantasy prompt subjectivity?”

Tejada’s publications on art history include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009). He has co-curated exhibitions on Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Luis Gispert. From 1987 to 1997 Tejada lived in Mexico City, where he served on the editorial board of the magazine Vuelta and was executive editor of Artes de México. He founded and co-edits the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas.

A former professor at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Texas at Austin, Tejada was appointed Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History by Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts in 2010.