Emiliana Cruz Cruz is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted field work with young day laborers in the Yakima Valley, as well as in the Chatino region of Oaxaca and in Chiapas. Her lines of research are primarily centered on the fields of education, linguistic rights, territory and linguistic documentation and revitalization. She is currently a research professor at the Mexico City campus of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). She has won the University of Massachusetts’s Distinguished Community Engagement Award and she forms part of the Dialogues between Indigenous Academics collective. Her publications include the recent We Must Keep Our Future From Slipping Through Our Fingers: Tomás Cruz Lorenzo and the New Chatino Generation, the result of a collective effort with Chatinos, and Theoretical Reflections on the Function of Linguistic-Anthropological Field Work: The Contributions of Indigenous Researchers from Southern Mexico, a collaboration with Indigenous academics.

Pedro Pitarch is an anthropology professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of the American Anthropology Research Group. He has a doctorate from the State University of New York at Albany and has been a guest professor at New York University, UC Berkeley and the UNAM. He studies the Maya cultures of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico, especially the Tzeltal language. He has worked there without interruption since 1988. His research centers on questions of cosmology, person and corporeality in Mesoamerican cultures. He has also addressed themes such as Indigenous languages, discourses and ritual texts (especially shamanic healing songs), among others. His books include Ch'ulel: An Ethnography of Tzeltal Souls (1996), The Jaguar and the Priest (2010) and The Fragrant Word: Tzeltal Shamanic Songs (2013). His most recent research project is on the topological concepts of Indigenous textiles.

I am a Tzotzil from Chamula, a photographer and a sales consultant at the Nissan dealership in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. Through visual narratives, I explore the interactions between the Tzotzil world and the global world. My photographic projects have emerged from the need to explore cultural tradition, the value of ancestral knowledge and acculturation into the Western world through the consumption market, emphasizing the growing interaction between the contemporary Indigenous world, which includes both me and my clients, and the globalized market in which we are immersed. My photographic work walks between two worlds, the Tzotzil world that has given me an origin (ch’ulel, “spirituality”) and the Western world that makes me question my beliefs and cultural practices. Here we visualize an internal fissure generated by the desire to belong to the Tzotzil cultural tradition and the acceptance needed to engage with globalization.

Artista, educadora e ilustradora, heredera de las expresiones artísticas de la comunidad de Sarhua, Ayacucho-Perú. Especializada en la pintura tradicional con tierras de colores naturales y pluma de ave. Cuenta con más de veinte años de experiencia en el pintado de las Tablas de Sarhua y en la experimentación con diversos soportes como murales, madera, textiles, escultura, etc. La diversidad de temáticas que aborda en sus trabajos incluye las costumbres del pueblo de Sarhua, la migración, el erotismo, el feminismo, la valorización de la mujer sarhuina en la sociedad y, su rol activo en las artes visuales contemporáneas. Durante los últimos años se ha dedicado a la promoción y transmisión de saberes tradicionales de Sarhua, en diversos talleres y exposiciones desarrollados en instituciones públicas y privadas dentro y fuera del Perú. Así mismo ha sido finalista y ganadora en diversos concursos de arte contemporáneo.

De la nación Uitoto, del Clan de la Garza Blanca. Artista visual, escritor, curador y activista por los derechos y el respeto de las cosmologías amazónicas. Ha participado en conferencias y conservatorios sobre arte amazónico. Diversos artículos de su autoría se han publicado en revistas académicas y diarios como El Comercio. Ganador del Concurso Nacional de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil “Carlota Carvallo de Nuñez”, con su libro el Sueño de Buinaima. Ganador del IX Concurso Nacional de Pintura del BCRP. Ganador de la Segunda Bienal Intercontinental de Arte Indígena. Desde el 2003 expone individual y colectivamente sus obras en galerías de arte y museos de Latinoamérica, Norteamérica, Europa y Asia. Su última exhibición individual y colectiva fue presentado en el Instituto Cervantes de Pekin y en la 8va Bienal Internacional de Arte de Beijing, China. Ha publicado, “El sueño de Buinaima”, “Fidoma y el bosque de estrellas”, “Las aves y sus colores” y, “El verano y la lluvia”.

(Loreto, Perú, 1960)Nacido en Pucaurquillo, localidad situada en el Amazonas peruano, es un pintor y escultor autodidacta, líder de los pueblos uitoto y bora, del río Ampiyacú. Su familia es sobreviviente del genocidio cauchero, ocurrido en el Amazonas a inicios del siglo XX. Su vida ha estado dedicada al desarrollo del arte y de la narración como forma de expresión. Entre sus muestras más destacadas, se encuentran Aimen+, presentada en el Museo Amazónico, en Iquitos (2010); El clan de la Garza Blanca, en el Centro Cultural El Olivar, en San Isidro, Lima, (2018); y El lugar de los espíritus, en el Instituto Nacional Peruano Norteamericano (IPNA), en Iquitos (2019), realizadas con la artista Nereyda López.

Artista contemporáneo, mambeólogo e investigador nacido en la cuna del pueblo Muruymuina en La Chorrera, Amazonas y perteneciente al Clan de la Garza Blanca, Eimen+. Sus pinturas nacen a partir de las ceremonias de sus abuelos que tenían lugar en el mambeadero, donde escuchaba los consejos de los mayores transmitidos desde la conexión con las plantas sagradas. “Mambear antes de tocar algo” es pedir permiso y dialogar antes del hacer, esta la relación más elemental de Aimema con sus raíces originarias y es en ese proceso y ritual donde busca los colores, símbolos y visiones que plasma en sus obras. Actualmente lidera el proyecto Kanasto de Abundancia, un centro cultural que busca visibilizar la diversidad cultural amazónica a través de la medicina ancestral, la gastronomía y el arte.

She has held individual exhibitions at the Centro Cultural La Ibérica (2022), Mérida, Yucatán and Solo Show Zurich at arteBA (2019), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Collectively, her work has been shown at the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda (2021-2022) in Mexico City, the Fundación Casa de México en España (2022), A Tale of a Tub (2021) in Rotterdam, the Servais Family Collection (2002) in Brussels, La Déesse Verte (2019) in Lille and at ARCOmadrid (2019).With Noé Martínez, she exhibited Tepalcates de sueños (2022), an Offsite project of the Swiss Institute New York in Mexico City, at the Venice International Performance Art Week in Venice and codirected La Palabra de la Cueva, winner of the Ojo and Alva Brothers Award in 2017. Her work forms part of the LACMA collections (United States).

Edgar Calel explores the complexities around the Indigenous experience through the cosmovision, rituals, community practices and beliefs of the Maya Kaqchiquel people, in opposition to the systematic racism and exclusion experienced by the Indigenous population of Guatemala. In 2021, he held his first individual exhibition, Pa ru tun che ́ (“In the Canopies”), at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2021); he has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions, including The Crack Begins Within, XI Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020); and Fuego continuo | Feu Continuel, National Gallery of Canada (2019). His work is held by the permanent collections of the Tate Modern in London, United Kingdom; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; and the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) in San José, Costa Rica, among others.

A promoter of Mayan language and culture, José Chi Dzul studied visual arts at the Yucatán Advanced School of the Arts. He has displayed his work at the 2022 New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT), which had the theme Abya Yala: Structural Origins. He has also carried out an artistic residency in 2022 at the Spore Initiative in Berlin. In 2020, he won the Young Mexican Painting in the UK prize, organized by the UK-Mexican Arts Society. He was awarded the Young Creators scholarship from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in 2019-2020, among others. He founded the first contemporary art space in southern Yucatán, Ko’ox Túukul, Ko’ox Boom (Let’s Think, Let’s Paint), in 2019. He has participated in 40 collective and individual exhibitions and his works form part of public and private collections in Mexico and abroad.

Angélica Serech is a weaver and textile artist. She learned ancestral textile techniques and began to work with traditional huipiles from Comalapa. Her curiosity led her to explore a more personal production revolving around textile art, giving her threads life. Her experimentation has led her to break with traditions and aesthetic canons, seeking to innovate with colors and techniques that are new to the textile tradition. In Guatemala, her work has been shown at the JUANNIO auction (2020), the 22nd Paiz Art Biennial (2021), Galería Extra (2021) and La Galería Rebelde (2022). Abroad, Serech has participated in the Art Paris international art fair, represented by La Galería Rebelde, and the Art City Gallery EQUINOX Women’s Exhibition (2021) in Ventura, California.