Mariana Guzman is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Missouri - Columbia, with an interest in the Global Middle Ages and illuminated manuscripts. Her dissertation research will focus on intersectional representations of gender in the 13th century Cantigas de Santa Maria, made for Alfonso X of Castile. She is currently a Graduate Instructor in the School of Visual Studies. 

She is originally from Mexico City, where she earned her BA from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana and worked in MUAC and Museo Soumaya as a museum mediator. She also worked in the auction house Morton Subastas, as a specialist in the antiques department. She earned her MA in History and Philosophy of Art from the University of Kent in Canterbury and Paris, with a thesis titled "Babel in Silence and Translation: Words in Contemporary Art for the Globalized Art World,” a comparative study of the presence and translation of words and images in contemporary artworks exhibited in Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989) and the Tercera Bienal de la Habana (Havana, 1989).