Vanesa Cejudo

Vanesa Cejudo Mejías is a Spanish sociologist, and a researcher and critic of contemporary visual culture. She advocates for the use of art in education, having worked both as an artist and as a professor at the Pontifical University of Salamanca. She also promotes the work of women in the Spanish art community as a director of the Asociación de Mujeres en las Artes Visuales (MAV) (the Association of Women in the Visual Arts).

Early life and education Cejudo studied sociology at the Pontifical University of Salamanca in Madrid, earning a bachelor's degree in sociology with a specialty in social psychology in 1997. At the Complutense University of Madrid, she obtained a certificate of teaching proficiency in 2006. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Isidro López-Aparicio (es), and was called La mediación cultural: Mecanismos de porosidad para construir cultura contemporánea sostenible (Cultural mediation: Porosity mechanisms to build contemporary sustainable culture). She is the deputy director and art critic at Brit-Es Magazine. Cejudo has also worked as a professor at the Pontifical University of Salamanca. MAV is a feminist organization that seeks to promote women in the Spanish art scene, in which men have traditionally been overrepresented, and to promote art that centers women and their experiences. An example of an initiative that Cejudo undertook with the organization is advocating that there be gender parity on awards committee in major art contests in Spain; after that was achieved, the group observed that the number of women winning awards also rose.

In 2017, Cejudo and her partners at Pensart launched the project Making Art Happen in both Madrid and London, which aims to demonstrate that art can be used in the classroom as a successful means of teaching other subjects like science and the humanities.