López-Durán earned her Ph.D in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT. Prior to joining the Rice University faculty, she was the 2009-2011 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. Her awards include predoctoral fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Dedalus Foundation, CLIR, Harvard Center for European Studies, Camargo Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Fulbright Program. Her work has been published in Europe, Asia, South America and the United States.