Alex Fialho

Alex Fialho is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. As an art historian and curator, Fialho focuses on modern and contemporary art, Black queer and feminist thought, and AIDS cultural studies. His dissertation “Apertures Onto AIDS: African American Photography and the Art History of the Storage Unit” animates AIDS-related histories through the lens of artists Lola Flash, Darrel Ellis, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Kia LaBeija. He was a 2023–2024 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Based in Los Angeles, Fialho is a 2024–2025 Predoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute and the 2025–2026 Luce/ACSL Ellen Holtzman Dissertation Fellow in American Art.

Fialho identifies as a white, queer, HIV-negative, cisgender person (he/they). Their work in community intends to be in service and support of queer, femme, Black and anti-racist creative practices. Prior to graduate school, Fialho worked as Programs Director of the New York-based arts non-profit Visual AIDS from 2014–2019, facilitating projects around the history and immediacy of the ongoing AIDS pandemic, while intervening against the widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives. As an Oral Historian for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project, he conducted in-depth oral histories with fifteen cultural producers including Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Julie Tolentino.

Fialho’s writing on artists such as King Cobra, Beauford Delaney, Juliana Huxtable, Josh Kline, Glenn Ligon, Alice Neel, Kenya (Robinson), Devan Shimoyama, and Sable Elyse Smith has been published in exhibition catalogs for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Andy Warhol Museum, David Zwirner Gallery, and more.

Since 2016, with collaborator Melissa Levin, Fialho has stewarded the legacy of artist Michael Richards. In 2021, Fialho and Levin co-curated Richards’s first museum retrospective—Michael Richards: Are You Down?—at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. In 2023, the retrospective traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The exhibition was recognized by Frieze magazine as one of the “Top 10 Shows in the United States of 2021” and by Hyperallergic as one of the “The Top 50 Exhibitions of 2023.”

Fialho has earned an MPhil and MA in the History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University, and a BA in Art History with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University.