Prior to joining the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Tomas Macsotay pursued his studies and postdoctoral work at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Leeds, Yorkshire, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. For his doctoral dissertation he earned an award from the Institut de France (Prix Marianne Roland Michel), and was a Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Sculpture Studies at Leeds. His project "Modernizing Saints. Academic Reform and Religious Sculpture in Valencia (ca. 1715-1808)" obtained a Marie Curie FP7 fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. He has been an invited speaker, among others, at the Fondation Custodia and INHA (Paris), the École du Louvre (Paris), the Warburg Institute in Londen, the University of Antwerp's Urban Studies Centre (Belgium), and the Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhaguen (Denmark).

He is mainly interested in understanding the evolution of sculpture after c. 1750, paying particular attention to discourses and techniques of the body. His major publications to date deal with sculpture and Ancien Régime Academies, more recently looking at the continuum between materialism, drawing and sculpting in Rome in the 1790s. His other interests include the execution site and its visual cultures in the wake of secularization and Enlightenment culture. He is currently preparing a monograph on Spanish ecclesiastical and ornate interiors examined from the theoretical notion of affective space.