About

Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, editor, and literary translator from the Portuguese living in Los Angeles. She is the editor in chief of Image magazine at the Los Angeles Times, 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, the Paris Review, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, New York Review of Books, LA Review of Books, 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 Emily Mason: Unknown to Possibility (Rizzoli), a long overdue monograph on an influential abstract painter of her time. Elisa is also the editor of Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction (Rizzoli), a monograph on one of the earliest American abstract artists, Emily Mason’s mother. Elisa is currently on the board of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, helping to oversee the legacies of these two artists.

In the past, Elisa has taught an Introduction to Translation class at UCLA Extension and an Art & Culture Writing workshop at Catapult. She also once gave tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Elisa has been awarded writing residencies at Art Omi (2022, 2015), Tin House (2022) and the Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland (2019). She has served as a fiction judge for the Best Translated Book Award, as well as a guest curator for exhibitions and art journals. Over the years she has co-organized literary and art events at Art Basel Miami, Soho House, McNally Jackson Books, and Hauser & Wirth. 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, where she was invited back as an Alumni Nonfiction Fellow in 2026. She received her MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University and her BA in English, with a minor in art history, from Barnard College.

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