Her own husband called her a “bear woman.” An 1854 advertisement in The New York Times said she was the “link between mankind and the ourang-outang.” She became known in the popular imagination during the mid-19th century as “the ugliest woman in the world.” After she died from complications of childbirth, her body and the body of her baby appeared for decades in “freak” exhibitions throughout Europe.

On Tuesday, more than a century and a half after her death, in 1860, the woman, Julia Pastrana, will finally be given a proper burial near her birthplace in Sinaloa, Mexico. Her return home from a locked storage room in an Oslo research institute would not have been possible without the nearly decade-long efforts of the New York-based visual artist Laura Anderson Barbata.

In 2003 Ms. Barbata’s sister, Kathleen Anderson Culebro, produced a staging of “The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World,” in Texas. That play, by Shaun Prendergast, had its debut in London in 1998 and is performed almost entirely in the dark. Mr. Prendergast said in an e-mail that the setting “seemed the perfect marriage — a woman known for her ugliness, but with a beautiful voice, presented in a way which would force the audience to conjure her with their imagination.”

Pastrana has also been the subject of films, including “The Ape Woman” (1964); an alternative rock song; and a comic book.