Mariana Aguirre is an art historian. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2008, after earning her M.A. from Brown University in 2002. In 1999 she completed her BA at Bryn Mawr College. Her work focuses on art and visual culture during Italian fascism and its reception of French modernism. In the past, he examined the works of Ardengo Soffici and Giorgio Morandi, specifically their creation of a ruralist current influenced by Cézanne and the Florentine Trecento and Quattrocento.

She is currently researching the influence of African art in French and Italian modernism. Thus, she takes up modernist primitivism, analyzing the appropriation of African sculpture in relation to European painting, sculpture and photography, especially in the Italian case. In this way, she examines the effect of African art on artists such as Marinetti, Carrà, Soffici, Modigliani and Sironi, as well as its intersection with colonial propaganda, racism and ethnography during the fascist regime.

She has taught at several universities in the United States: Sewanee (The University of the South), Eastern Connecticut State University and Middle Tennessee State University. She received grants from the Fulbright and Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Secretaría de Cultura del Estado de Jalisco.