Gabriela Siracusano earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires, specializing in the material dimension of artistic production, from the 16th century to the modern day. She is a Principal Scientific Researcher at CONICET (National Research Council, Argentina) and director of the Centro de Investigaciones en Arte, Materia y Cultura at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. Chair Professor of Theory and Historiography of Art at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. Siracusano has been Getty Posdoctoral Fellow in 2003 and Guggenheim Fellow in 2006-2007. She has been a visiting professor and scholar at several universities including Columbia University, Cambridge University, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, and Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz, among others, and will be Tinker Visiting Professor at UT Austin in 2019. She is director of several research projects concerning historical and chemical approaches to Spanish American Colonial art, including "Materiality between art, science and culture in the Viceroyalties (16th to 18th centuries)" sponsored by The Getty Foundation.

Her research and teaching focus on the material dimension of Colonial South American artworks, employing an interdisciplinary method that combines cultural art history, chemistry, and conservation. She is author of many books and articles including El Poder de los Colores (Buenos Aires, FCE, 2005; ALAA award 2006) and Pigments and Power in the Andes (London, Archetype, 2011), in which she has developed the study of a material history of color in Andean workshops (the "making"), the exchange of ideas between different parties including painters, pharmacists, physicians, alchemists, etc. (the "knowledge"), and the symbolic and powerful dimension of these colored powders as found in the sacred and political messages projected by the images (the "power"). Between 2003 and 2011 she focused on iconography of the Four Last Things in the Andean region, and published La Paleta del Espanto (Buenos Aires, Unsamedita, 2011). She's now working in the co-edition, together with Agustina Rodriguez Romero, of the book Materia Americana, which will gather together the most updated material studies on Pre-Columbian and Colonial artistic productions in the Americas.