Maria Thereza Alves is a Brazilian-born artist descended from the country's indigenous, African, and European peoples. She is best known for her award-winning work Seeds of Change (2004–2018), which links ecology and colonial history. One of the founders of Brazil's Green Party in São Paulo, Alves received the 2016–2018 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, awarded to artists who take great risks to advance social justice in profound and visionary ways.

[Recipes for Survival intends] to retrieve the testimony of people missing from history…Maria Thereza Alves shows the persistence of the effects of colonialism and the survival of the conditions against which the 'tri-continental front' fought. But if this project dates back to the 1980s, the conditions of existence described are still very visible. (Critique d'Art) [Recipes for Survival] has been compared to the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee. The comparison is apt, although in this case Alves palys the roles of both photographer and writer. The book opens with 72 images spread over 137 pages that would make Evans proud. They are followed by 106 pages containing prose that is as insightful as Agee's, if a lot more restrained...All together, it adds up to a detailed sociological study. (PhotoBook Journal) Recipes for Survival is the outcome of deep engagement and participation; it deploys photography, but it does so in tandem with an attentive listening and in conversation with its subjects...it represents a seeing and listening beyond surface appearances and is a unique specular engagement with the conditions of other lives...Recipes for Survival is an early example of the commitment evident in Alves's works, and maybe one of its sources, to creating a space for the hearing and recognition of the indigenous voices and knowledges subsumed under the powerful noises of the modern neoliberal capitalist world and the longstanding and brutally damaging aftermaths of colonising processes. (Third Text)

Maria Thereza Alves is a Brazilian-born artist descended from the country's indigenous, African, and European peoples. She is best known for her award-winning work Seeds of Change (2004–2018), which links ecology and colonial history. One of the founders of Brazil's Green Party in São Paulo, Alves received the 2016–2018 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, awarded to artists who take great risks to advance social justice in profound and visionary ways.

[Recipes for Survival intends] to retrieve the testimony of people missing from history…Maria Thereza Alves shows the persistence of the effects of colonialism and the survival of the conditions against which the 'tri-continental front' fought. But if this project dates back to the 1980s, the conditions of existence described are still very visible. (Critique d'Art) [Recipes for Survival] has been compared to the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee. The comparison is apt, although in this case Alves palys the roles of both photographer and writer. The book opens with 72 images spread over 137 pages that would make Evans proud. They are followed by 106 pages containing prose that is as insightful as Agee's, if a lot more restrained...All together, it adds up to a detailed sociological study. (PhotoBook Journal) Recipes for Survival is the outcome of deep engagement and participation; it deploys photography, but it does so in tandem with an attentive listening and in conversation with its subjects...it represents a seeing and listening beyond surface appearances and is a unique specular engagement with the conditions of other lives...Recipes for Survival is an early example of the commitment evident in Alves's works, and maybe one of its sources, to creating a space for the hearing and recognition of the indigenous voices and knowledges subsumed under the powerful noises of the modern neoliberal capitalist world and the longstanding and brutally damaging aftermaths of colonising processes. (Third Text)