Bárbara Mujica

Bárbara Mujica is an American scholar, novelist, short story writer, and literary critic.

She is an Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Georgetown University.

In the late 1990s, Mujica developed a draft for what became the biographical novel Frida, based on the life of Frida Kahlo, which was first published in 2001 and has since been translated into 18 languages.

Mujica was on the board of directors for the Washington Review from 1994 through 1998.

Her novels include Frida (2001), Sister Teresa (2007), and Miss del Río (2022).

Mujica attended the University of California at Los Angeles for her undergraduate education, and studied French literature.

She then attended Sorbonne University for graduate study in French, and completed her doctorate at New York University in Spanish literature, with Antonio Regalado as her dissertation advisor.

Her writing career began with writing short stories, and she also taught Spanish literature.

In 2007, she published the historical novel Sister Teresa, about the woman who became Saint Teresa of Ávila, and the book was translated into Spanish in 2017.

Her next novel, I am Venus, a fictional biography of the model for the La Venus del espejo painting by Diego Velázquez, was published in 2013.

Her novel Miss del Rio, published in 2022, is about the life of the movie star Dolores del Río.

In 2019, an essay collection was published to honor her scholarly work, titled Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain: A Tribute to Bárbara Mujica.