PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Antwerp (UA, Belgium) and the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA, Belgium), Lara García Díaz also holds a Research Master's degree in Arts & Culture from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU, Netherlands), where she graduated Cum Laude. In recent years, her work has focused on analyzing the social dimension of art and design from posthumanist, feminist, and ecological perspectives, while also exploring research-through-design techniques informed by new materialisms, systems thinking, and pluriversal approaches.
Teaching / Research
She is a Lecturer and Researcher, Coordinator of Eina Research, and Head of the Design Culture section at Eina, University of Art and Design. She also works as an Associate Professor at Elisava, Faculty of Design and Engineering in Barcelona, where she leads the course on Social Design in the Master’s in Applied Research in Design. Additionally, she has been a guest lecturer at Istituto Europeo di Design (IED Barcelona), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the Dog Time program at Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam), and a speaker at institutions including Royal College London (UK), Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), and the National University of Ireland Maynooth (Dublin).
Professional activity
With support from the Flemish Scientific Research Fund (FWO) through the Odysseus Grant, she joined the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO) at the University of Antwerp in 2016. Since then, she has continued to develop research on the social dimension of art and design from posthumanist, feminist, and ecological viewpoints, paying particular attention to care and social reproduction in social design, co-design, and participatory design. She is currently part of the research project Artistic Research Responses to Historical Crisis (RIACHI), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Her contribution focuses on exploring aesthetics of co-creation in social, speculative, and transition design practices.
She is also Principal Investigator of the project Situated Creative Practices for the Pluriverse, funded through the European Cooperation initiative CREA-CULT-2004-COOP. Here, her work continues to develop research-through-design methodologies informed by new materialisms, systems thinking, and pluriversal approaches. She has published in several indexed academic journals, chapters in academic books, and actively participates in national and international conferences and congresses.
Her approach to participatory action research is developed through the Larre collective, which she co-founded, and with which she carries out co-design, community facilitation, participatory design, and cultural mediation projects from a systemic, postcolonial, and intersectional perspective. Larre was a winner of the Componer saberes call from the Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation and has collaborated with a multitude of cultural institutions such as La Capella (Barcelona), DHub (Barcelona), Centro Huarte (Pamplona), Matadero (Madrid), O'Gabinete (Santiago de Compostela), Karraskan (Bilbao), etc.
As a cultural researcher, she has developed and participated in projects at institutions such as MuHKA (Antwerp), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht). She has also participated as a speaker in public programs at the Thailand Biennale (2021), ZonaMACO (Mexico, 2020), Oslo Biennial (2019), and Venice Biennale (2018).
Publications
(Only the 6 most recent ones are listed)
García Díaz, Lara (2024). El derecho (de una hija) a la pereza. Una tentativa a la posibilidad de la inoperancia en la esfera de la reproducción social. Laocoonte. Revista de Estética y Teoría de las Artes, vol. Arte de la inoperancia, University of Valencia.
García Díaz, Lara (2022). Problematising Feminist Literature on Reproductive Labour and Care Ethics for Cultural Commoning: Intersectionality as a Strategy. En, Volont, Louis & Thijs Lijster & Pascal Gielen (ed.) The Rise of the Common City. Academic Scientific Publisher. Pág.115-129.
García Díaz, Lara (2021) ‘Encarnar los umbrales desde el tartamudeo minoritario’. En, Laura Vallés (ed.) Concreta (Vol. 17). Valencia: Editorial Concreta. Pages 127-139.
García Díaz, Lara (2021) ‘An act of Love’. En Karina Beumer (ed.) Terms of Conditions. Bruselas: Green Pijn Productions. Pages 378-386.
García Díaz, Lara & Pascal Gielen (2021) ‘Precariat a revolutionary Class?’. En, Lara van Meeteren, Ariane Sutthavong & Bart Wissink (ed.) Common dissent: art and politics in the age of radical appropriation. Amsterdam: Sutthavong. Pages 123-134.
García Díaz, Lara & Pascal Gielen (2020) ‘The potency of Commoning’. En, Dorothée Dupuis, Diego del Valle (ed.) No Money, No Problem (issue 17) Terremoto. México: Motto Books. Pages 33-39.
Presentation of communication or paper at conferences and seminars
(Only the 6 most recent are listed)
Garcia Díaz, Lara (2025). Excedente y materia sobrante. Una iniciativa de reparación desde el diseño participativo. II Congreso Internacional en Humanidades Ecológicas. Organized by JHU-UPF Public Policy Center. Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, June 30-31, 2025.
Garcia Díaz, Lara (2025). Diseño especulativo más allá de lo humano. Odradek y la extrañeza de las cosas. Congreso Franz Kafka. Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences. University of Valencia, April 1-3, 2025.
García Díaz, Lara (2025). Ejercicios de convivencia objetual a través del diseño. Congreso Internacional sobre nuevos materialismos. Complutense University of Madrid, February 24-28, 2025.
García Diaz, Lara (2025). El diseño participativo desde la óptica de los cuidados. XVIII Workshop on Aesthetics Exprerience: Aesthetics, Rationality and Criticism, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, January 13-14, 2025.
García Díaz, Lara (2023). Estéticas post-humanas y futuros posibles. Aisthesis y poiesis más allá de lo humano. Congreso Internacional “X Encontro Ibérico de estética”, University of Funchal, October 24-26, 2024.
García Díaz, Lara; Costa, Tània; Capdevila, Pol (2023). La investigación y la intervención de artistas y diseñadores en comunidades. International Congress “Segundo Encuentro de Investigación SyMPOSIO SEyTA”, Granada, April 20-22, 2023.