Rate My Professor Ella Maria Diaz

Diaz’s research specializations center on the art, poetry, performance, and political activism of the Royal Chicano Air Force, a vanguard Chicano/a art collective founded in Sacramento during the U.S. civil rights era. Her monograph Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (University of Texas Press, 2017) received the 2019 Book Award from the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. She authored José Montoya, A Ver: Revisioning Art History, Volume 12 (Chicano Studies Research Center, 2020), which won Gold Medals for Best Arts Book and Best Biography at the 2020 International Latino Book Awards. Diaz contributed to the anthology Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chican@/Latin@ Young Adult Literature (2020), earning the 2022 Edited Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association. Her essay “The Necessary Theater of the Royal Chicano Air Force” (Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2013) was anthologized in The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2016 (2016). Current projects include essays on Chicano artist José Montoya’s early poetry in the context of digital humanities and analyses of testimonio as an art form across the Americas. She serves on the Editorial Board of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and as a National Advisory Council member for Rhizomes of Mexican American Art Since 1848.