Kendra Brewer

Kendra Brewer (she/they) is a scholar whose research focuses on the arts produced in Mesoamerica through the early colonial period. Her work pays particular attention to how art, especially written art, reflects contact among the various ethnic and linguistic groups in the region during this time. Brewer’s research interests include the impact of art on individual and collective experiences of identity, the relationship between Mesoamerican languages and their visual or material expressions, and issues of information preservation and transmission.

Before coming to Yale, Brewer earned a B.A. in the History of Art and Spanish from Johns Hopkins University. Her honors thesis, “Mediating (with) Mendicants: Power Negotiations and Cultural Continuities at San Juan Bautista de Cuauhtinchan,” analyzed how the program of this sixteenth-century church and convent reflected and influenced power negotiations between multiple mendicant orders and ethnic groups, shaping the socio-political landscape and artistic production of the early colonial period. Brewer is a Beinecke Scholar, and her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Walters Art Museum, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and the Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Research Stipend at Johns Hopkins University.