Carla Acevedo-Yates was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico and has worked as a curator, researcher, and art critic across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. She is the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the MCA Chicago, where she recently curated Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today. Previous exhibitions at the MCA include Carolina Caycedo: From the Bottom of the River, and Chicago Works: Omar Velázquez. In Upcoming exhibitions include the MCA presentation of Duane Linklater: mymothersside and Entre Horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico, an exhibition that examines the artistic and social justice genealogies between Chicago and Puerto Rico.

Previously, she was the Associate Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University where she curated over fifteen exhibitions, including solo presentations of new work by Johanna Unzueta, Claudia Peña Salinas, Duane Linklater, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. She curated Fiction of a Production, a major exhibition by conceptual art pioneer David Lamelas and cocurated Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. Major group exhibitions include The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes. She earned an MA in curatorial studies and contemporary art from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where she was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize, and a BA in Spanish and Latin American Cultures from Barnard College, where she received the Clara Schifrin Memorial Spanish Prize in Poetry. In 2015 she was awarded a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for an article on Cuban painter Zilia Sánchez.