Professor Víctor Alejandro Sorell was born and raised in Mexico City, México. Educated in the midwest at Shimer College [Comparative Literature] and the University of Chicago [Art History and Social Thought], he has been a faculty member and administrator at Chicago State University (CSU) thirty-eight years.

Sorell is currently University Distinguished Professor of Art and Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. Earlier in his academic career, he served for twelve years [1975-’80, and 1983-‘89] as chairperson of CSU’s Department of Art & Design. Thereafter, between 1995 and 2005, he also directed the CSU-University of Minnesota MacArthur Foundation Undergraduate Honors Program in International Studies. He would later become instrumental in establishing CSUs Honors College.

Over the years, Professor Sorell has held a number of visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Michigan State University, UCLA, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Between 1980 and 1983, he took a leave from CSU to accept an invitation to join the staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities where he served as a Senior Program Officer with the Division of Public Programs.

A career researcher, Sorell is nationally recognized as one of the pioneers in the documentation, critical interpretation, and promotion of Chicano Art History, a once neglected branch of American art. In 1975, he co-founded a Chicago-based community arts organization, el Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH). Within the purview of Chicano art history, he has documented public artforms. Awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship in the Humanities through the University of New Mexico's Southwest Hispanic Research Institute—with which Sorell remains affiliated as a Research Associate—he launched a documentary study of paños (cloths/ handkerchiefs) and tattoos done inside la pinta by prison inmates. This subject is addressed in-part in an essay Sorell contributed to a book of which he’s also co-editor, Nuevomexicano Cultural Legacy: Forms, Agencies, & Discourse. Another book, Born of Resistance: Cara a Cara Encounters with Chicana/o Visual Culture, 1970-Present is now in preparation [with co-editor Scott Baugh] for the University of Arizona Press; expected publication in late 2009, or early 2010.