Dr. Montse Morcate, Spain
Artist, researcher and lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Morcate’s research focuses on the visual representation of death, illness and grief, and she takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses contemporary art, visual anthropology, the medical humanities, the digital humanities, photojournalism and historical memory.
She has participated in a host of national and international conferences and seminars, and she has published many papers and book chapters on the subject (Routledge, Palgrave MacMillan, Mortality and EPI, to name but a few). She has co-edited a book entitled The Unveiled Image: Photographic practices in illness, death and grief (Sans Soleil, 2019).
Morcate has been a researcher on a number of projects such “Sharing pain and grief online: the self-referential digital imagen of illness and death as an element of destigmatisation, connection, visibility and co-presence” (2015-2017 – BBVA Foundation); “Visibilising pain: visual narratives of illness and transmedia storytelling” (2019-2022 – Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities) or “Ethics of images of illness, death and grief in the time of Covid-19” (2020 – Grífols Foundation). In recent years, Morcate has pursued a number of post-doctoral research stays, including at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University (New York), the Morbid Anatomy Museum (New York), the History of Science Department (CSIC- Madrid) and the MACBA Study Centre (Barcelona).
At the same time, Morcate has been developing, publishing and exhibiting her own art works internationally, pursuing projects that reflect her field of research.