About

Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Portuguese who lives in Los Angeles. She is the editorial director of L.A. Times Image, the style and culture magazine at the newspaper. She was previously a senior editor at Hyperallergic. You can find her writing in the Los Angeles Times, Paris Review Daily, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, NYR Daily, The Nation, LA Review of Books, Guernica Magazine, and other places.

In her work as a translator, Elisa primarily focuses on Brazilian poetry. In 2017, she published her translations of the Brazilian poet Ana Martins Marques in This House (Scrambler Books), a book centered on the idea of home, which she also illustrated. In 2022, her Ana Cristina Cesar translations won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, judged by Daniel Borzutzky.

Elisa is the editor of Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction (Rizzoli), a monograph on one of the earliest, overlooked American abstract artists. Since then, Elisa has joined the board of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, helping to oversee the legacies of these two phenomenal artists.

In the past, Elisa has taught an Art & Culture Writing workshop at Catapult and an Introduction to Translation class at UCLA Extension. She also served as an advisor at Uncool Artist, where she met with students and focused on workshopping their artist statements and bios.

Elisa has been awarded writing residencies at Art Omi (2022, 2015), Tin House (2022) and the Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland (2019). She was a 2021 recipient of the Mae Fellowship, a virtual program providing support for women and nonbinary writers working on their first books. She has spoken about her work at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Barnard College, the New School, CalArts, and other places. Her essays have been highlighted as "must-reads" by the Atlantic and ARTnews, and she’s been interviewed about her work for KCET, UCLA, and Electric Literature.

Elisa has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a master's degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University. She received her bachelor's in English, with a minor in art history, from Barnard College.

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