Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz is Leverhulme Distinguished Professor and Senior Fellow at St Anthony's College, University of Oxford.
Martinez-Ruiz's work interrogates and traces the connections between the Bakongo traditions of graphic writing prevalent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo & Angola and the Palo Monte traditions in Cuba.
More broadly, Martinez-Ruiz's research challenges the disciplinary boundaries of art history to unfold the rich and valuable visual communication, ethnography, ecology and cosmologies by and through the art and cultural heritage of African Atlantic diasporas.
At Yale he was a student of Robert Farris Thompson, who wrote the Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy.
The film project became a point of entry into the Kongo graphic writing systems and rock painting studies that has informed his research for over 27 years.