Ariel Florencia Richards
Ariel Florencia Richards is a Chilean writer and scholar of visual arts.
Career
Richards is a recipient of the Bicentennial Fellowship, which supported her completion of a MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She first published her poetry in pamphlets and zines which were presented at NY Art Book Fair and Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art. Her calligraphy is included in the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives permanent collections.Richards teaches writing and architecture at Universidad Diego Portales and is working toward a PhD at Pontificia Universidad de Chile. During the pandemic, she wrote her novel Inacabada, which was published in 2023. Set during a trip to New York city for a visual arts conference, the book explores the relationship between a mother and her daughter, Juana, a researcher of the arts who has begun her gender transition. While the narration moves between her past and present, Juana makes a second attempt to open up to her mother about her true gender identity.
In 2023 she was a doctoral fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where she studied the personal papers of architect Gordon Matta-Clark for three months. From that residency, she wrote an essay book that crosses biography with essay and novel, entitled ''Gordon Matta-Clark. Contra viejas superficies .''