José Maçãs de Carvalho

After obtaining a first degree in Modern Languages and Literature (Coimbra University, Portugal), he completed a postgraduate course in Management of the Arts (Institute of European Studies in Macau, 1998) in Macau where he taught and lived from 1994 to 1999. He obtained a Phd in Contemporary Art at  Colégio das Artes, University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 2014.

He teaches at the University of Coimbra, in the Architecture Department and Colégio das Artes where he is the Supervisor of the Master degree in Curatorship. Since 2020 he is the curator of the Coimbra Contemporary Art Center.
He has received scholarships from Fundação Gulbenkian (1994), Fundação Oriente (1999-2001), Instituto Camões (2001) and Centro Português de Fotografia (2003). He has works (photographs and videos) in several public and private art collections .

He was both curator and participant in the exhibition My own private pictures (Plataforma Revólver, LisbonPhoto Biennial, 2005), which lay at the origin of his nomination for the BES Photo Prize in 2005 (most important prize for photography in Portugal).In 2008 was shortlisted for the Pictet Prix (Suisse Bank Award for Photography).

He´s been showing photography since the early 90s  and video since the 2000s. In 2013 showed videos in New York and Paris ("Fuso NY”, Union Square Park, and “Chantiers d´Europe”, Theatre de la Ville), and in 2011 in Oslo (“When a painting moves...something must be rotten!”, Stenersen Museum). Between 2011 and 2017 set up seven exhibitions as a practical project for his doctoral programme around the subject of archive and memory at CAV, Coimbra; Ateliers Concorde, Lisbon and Colégio das Artes, Coimbra; VPF gallery, Lisbon; The City Hall Photographic Archive, Lisbon, Museu do Chiado and MAAT Museum in Lisbon and a book, “Unpacking: a desire for the archive”, was published by StolenBooks. In 2015, a book of photographs, “Partir por todos os dias”, was published by Editora Amieira. In 2016 his photographic work about Oporto university campus was published on a book called “Aspela” by Scopio Editions and Oporto Polytechnic Institute.

In 2016 the book “Archive and Apparatus” was published by  Centro de Arte de S. J. da Madeira and in   2017 also the book “Archive and Interval”, by Stolen Books/Colégio das Artes-Universidade de Coimbra and MAAT Museum, with contributions by Pedro Pousada, José Bragança de Miranda, Adelaide Ginga and Ana Rito.