Ana M. Franco’s research and teaching center on twentieth century Latin American art, with a focus on abstract art from Colombia and the Southern Cone. Her scholarship explores how abstraction operated as a site of aesthetic and political negotiation, especially in relation to the decorative and the artisanal, and how Latin American artists engaged with international modernisms while forging distinct local trajectories.

Ana is the author of Neo-clásicos: Edgar Negret y Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar entre París, Nueva York y Bogotá, 1944–1964 (Ediciones Uniandes, 2019), a study of the origins of geometric abstraction in Colombia through the transatlantic itineraries of two key figures. She is co-editor of New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America (Routledge, 2019), which brings together new perspectives on abstraction across the region. She is working on a book manuscript titled Hidden Realities: Colombian Women Artists in Abstraction, which examines the trajectory of four artists in the second half of the twentieth century in Colombia and analyzes the convergence of painting and sculpture with ceramics, textile, and furniture design. 

In addition to her academic publications, Ana has been engaged in curatorial activities that seek to connect the history of art with more general audiences.  Her curatorial work includes Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar: la vida entre cajas y papeles and the co-curated exhibition Marta Traba cuatro veces, both presented at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia.  She has also collaborated with Banco de Archivos Digitales de Arte en Colombia (BADAC) at Universidad de los Andes, a long-term digital humanities project, to make the archives of various Colombian artists widely available. 

Ana is currently President of the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA). She was the 2020 Latin American Collection Fellow at the Cisneros Institute of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has also been a Fulbright Scholar. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, an MLitt in Art History from the University of St Andrews, and an MA in Philosophy from the National University of Colombia. Prior to joining Rice University, Ana was Associate Professor of Art History at the Univerisdad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia.