Speaker & Facilitator Bios

María de los Ángeles Aguilar is a Guatemalan Maya-K´iche´ historian. She is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) at Yale University, where she teaches courses on Latin American history. Her work focuses on state-sponsored violence, policing and criminalization in Guatemala during the civil war (1960-1996).  She has worked on collaborative research projects in Guatemala and Mexico centered on historical memory, collecting testimony from indigenous communities and genocide survivors.  Dr. Aguilar has also been a columnist for Guatemala’s el Periódico, Agencia Ocote, and Jacobin. 

John Manuel Arias is a Costa Rican-American poet, and the National Bestselling author of Where There Was Fire. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. 

Luciana Chamorro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist of the Central American region and its diasporas. Luciana writes on revolution and its afterlives, authoritarian populism, and the confluences of politics with structures of desire, affect and aesthetics. She is writing a book titled Afterlives of Revolution: Political Attachments in Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua, which examines the affective economies that underpin what appear to be paradoxical forms of popular investment in the authoritarian political project of Daniel Ortega in contemporary Nicaragua. In addition to her written scholarship, Luciana has created a series of ethnographic and participatory filmmaking projects on the politics of memory in Nicaragua, and collaborated in other audiovisual projects with artists based in Los Angeles. She also works as a pro bono expert witness for asylum cases in U.S. immigration court.

Rosa is a poet, artist, & activist of Mayan K’iche Kaqchiquel origin who has studied social sciences, cultural management, cinema, and audiovisual performances. The author of five poetry books, her work has been widely anthologized and translated into Maya K’iche’, French, English, and Norwegian, among other languages. She has also experimented with other artistic expressions such as theater, performance, video and currently with music in the duo project: Selva y Cerro, which combines poetry, electronic music and traditional instruments. Rosa also works enthusiastically and passionately with women and Indigenous movements in Guatemala. 

Kaysha Corinealdi is an Associate Professor of History at Emerson College and a 2023-2024 Newhouse Center Humanities Fellow at Wellesley College. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth-century histories of empire, migration, feminism, and Afro-diasporic activism in the Americas. She is also actively engaged in public scholarship through works with museums, public magazines and blogs, and podcasts. Corinealdi has presented her work nationally and internationally on themes such as Black feminist internationalism, Afro-Latinx educators in New York City, and anti-Blackness in the Americas. She is the author of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2022). Her writing can also be found in the American Historical Review, Public Books, Social Text, the Washington Post, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the International Journal of Africana Studies, and The Global South.

Kency Cornejo is associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico where she teaches Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art Histories. Her teaching, research, and publications focus on contemporary art of Central America and its US-based diaspora, art and activism in Latin America, and decolonizing methodologies in art. Some of her publications on US/Central American art can be found in the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture; Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; and Art and Documentation, among others. She is author of the book Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, forthcoming with Duke University Press (Oct. 2024), which analyses thirty years of art and decoloniality in the isthmus. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford foundations, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award Grant. Kency was born to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California. 

Jorge Cuéllar (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latinx & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College where he writes and teaches courses on modern Central America, migration, race, and critical social theory. Jorge’s work on the politics, culture, and history of Central America and its diasporas has been published widely across a variety of academic and public venues. He is presently completing his first book project titled Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador and is beginning research on a new project focused on environmental politics in Central America. Founded in 2019, Cuéllar also advises the Central America Project, a student-driven public humanities initiative focused on drawing attention to Central American intellectual and cultural production in the U.S. and in the region. In 2022, this collective work yielded the exhibition Bolas de Fuego: Culture and Conflict in Central America at the Hood Museum of Art.

Film producer and Poet from a Mayan/Aguachapaneco - Nonualka decent in what is today El Salvador

Eileen (she/ella) is a scholar-practitioner of higher education. At Yale, she has directed the university's Latine Cultural Center since 2015, becoming the center's first Salvadoran and Central American director. In her role, Eileen passionately advocates for students, works alongside them, and partners with faculty, staff, alumni, and New Haven community members and organizations. Eileen is also a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University. In her scholarship, Eileen examines colonial practices of the imperial university through the centering of Central American and Isthmian peoples and their transisthmian hybridity within the higher education ecology. Eileen theoretically engages with Central American epistemologies, histories, and cultural practices of revolutionary storying in her methodological explorations. Her dissertation project examines three conditions of (in)visibility – visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility – as experienced by Central American and Isthmian faculty in the U.S. academy. Outside of the academy, Eileen co-founded the Central American Writer's Collective in 2020 and continues to co-organize it with thoughtful, caring, and brilliant Central American and Isthmian scholars and storytellers. 

Dr. Daisy E. Guzman Nunez is a Garifuna American scholar from the South Bronx. Through a Black Feminist Ethnographic lens, she bears witness to ancestral praxis and ancestral knowledge embedded in the cultural performativity of Garifuna women and their matrilineal networks. By exploring Transnational migration and returning to the homeland from the perspective of Garifuna women, she contributes to the discourse of Indigeneity and hemispheric Blackness.

Jessica Hoppe is a Honduran writer and creator of @nuevayorka. She has been featured on ABC News, HBOMax Pa'lante! and her work has appeared in the Latino Book Review, The New York Times, Vogue, Paper Magazine, and elsewhere. Jessica is a board member of Time of Butterflies, a non-profit supporting families through domestic abuse recovery. Her debut memoir, First In the Family, is forthcoming in 2024 from Flatiron. 

Andrea Ixchíu is a Maya K'iche woman from Totonicapán, Guatemala. Journalist, land protector, human rights activist. For more than fifteen years she has been working in community communication processes to care for the life and territories of indigenous peoples. She is co-founder of the initiatives: Hackeo Cultural, Futuros Indígenas, Festivales Solidarios. She is a cultural manager, producer and audiovisual director. Right now is a consultant at Culture Hack Labs an international not-for-profit consultancy that supports organisations, social movements and activists to create cultural actions for systems change. 

Andrea is a Nobel Women’s Initiative Fellow, Ford Global Fellow, Bertha Foundation Fellow, was awarded with the Sakharov Prize Fellowship which honours individuals and groups who defend human rights and freedom of expression. Among her most recent works are the short films: Cho Uk'ayib'al (2019), Cura de la Tierra, documentary series (2021). She is wrapping up her first feature-length documentary. 

Freddy Jesse Izaguirre is a Nawa-Pipil writer and poet. His work has been published in GEN, PAPER, LEVEL, among others, and included with Caravan for the Children—later displayed as an exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA. During the mid-80s Freddy Jesse and his family left El Salvador for the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up undocumented and very afraid. He’s now an outspoken critic of U.S. border policy and migrant abuse. Currently, he lives in NYC (unceded Lenape land) with his partner and their cat Fifi.

Katy Maldonado Dominguez is a Honduran first-generation graduate student. She received her bachelor’s degrees from UCLA in Chicana/o Studies and Geography. Her research interests are shaped by her experiences as a Central American immigrant from Honduras and DACA recipient. Her dissertation explores how Central American students think about identity, belonging, and kinship within a context of displacement. In addition, she examines how undocumented queer parents create and navigate families as they resist the twin pressures of xenophobia and homophobia. Her research on undocumented queer families has been published in the anthology We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States edited by Leisy Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales. 

Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections that's what you get (Brooklyn Art Press, 2021) and one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press / A Gathering of the Tribes, 2011). She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collaborative. She teaches writing for the City University of New York and holds degrees in English from Brown University and poetry from the City College of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan where she is working on bloodletters, a book about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.

Cristian Padilla Romero is a migrant and child of campesino parents from rural Honduras. Cristian migrated as a 7-year-old child to Atlanta, Georgia. Due to Gorgia's restrictive policies towards undocumented students—including DACAmented ones like himself at the time, Cristian went to Pomona College in California, where he received generous financial aid to attend. After falling in love with radical Latin American History in college, Cristian majored in Latin American Studies and pursued a path in academia with the help of his mentors. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Yale University's History program. Cristian is a scholar of modern Central American, Honduran History, Black Central America, U.S. empire. and Central American Studies. Cristian’s dissertation explores how Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Indigenous Garifuna radicals negotiated and confronted the rapacious nature of racial capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and anti-Black nationalism in Honduras during the early and mid-twentieth century. Cristian argues that by partaking in the Black Radical Tradition, namely through Garveyism and, later, Communist and other Leftist ideologies, these radicals sought to transform their material and subjective realities away from poverty, democratic exclusion, and racism towards new and radical visions of social justice and national and diasporic belonging. Cristian invites scholars to think about what we can learn from the Black and Indigenous history of Honduras, whose history of survival, resilience, and radicalism are as deep as they are diverse yet so overlooked and misunderstood.

Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a poet, interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and literary curator. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research project, Acts in Inventory, examines how diasporic peoples in the 20th and 21st century U.S. have responded to colonial histories of loss through counter-acts of accumulating material objects in poetry, visual art, performance, and domestic life. As a member of the Central American diaspora collective Tierra Narrative, she has co-curated programs and folios that bring together Central American writers in the diaspora and the isthmus, including for The Poetry Project (NYC) and literary journal FENCE. She has been recognized as a CantoMundo Poetry Fellow and independently teaches virtual critical-creative writing workshops open to people of all experiences. The author of three prior chapbooks, she is completing her first full-length poetry collection. She hails from a Salvadoran and Iranian family in Alief, southwest Houston, Texas. 

briana k. n. rodríguez (they/them) is a compassionate non-binary, Maya Ch’orti’ educator, thought partner, and learner. Their research critically examines the philosophy of dominant mathematics and Maya mathematics in the U.S. and Central America, as well as asking, “What is the purpose of (mathematics) education?” They collaborate with Nawa and Maya community educators virtually and in the isthmus to co-create educational spaces for education towards self-determination and realizing Indigenous futurity. Additionally, they are a co-organizer for the Central American and Isthmian Writers’ Group. They are currently a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Nalya Rodriguez received their PhD in Sociology from the University of California Irvine, where they were active in creating spaces for Central American students to engage in conversations around issues and research about Central America. Currently, they are a Postdoctoral Scholar Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California in American Studies and Ethnicity. Nalya has organized within the Central American community across California around issues of incarceration and immigration. As a gang-impacted scholar and activist Nalya has continuously advocated for an abolition of the police state and an investment in youth development and enrichment programs. They have worked in secondary education programs for currently incarcerated students and students in at-promise communities. Their research focuses on race, policing, and violence in the US and Central America. Their dissertation research examines the social and legal conditions that have constructed Central Americans as terrorists in the US between 1980 and 2010. Nalya studies how the terrorism, criminal, and immigration legal systems converge into a nexus through which a Central American Threat narrative fuels legal violence and framing of Salvadorans in the media as threats to national security.

Julio Serrano Echeverría is a Guatemalan writer, poet, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Mestizo, African and Mayan descent. He has held fellowships from the Fundación Carolina, the Iberoamerican Artists Residence FONCA-AECID and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in the US, where he has also been artist in residence and lectures regularly on poetry and Latin American culture. His poetry collections include Tierra, Antes del mar, Estados de la materia, Central Ámerica, and his children's books include En botas de astronauta and Dos cabezas para meter un gol. He was one of the founders of the Quetzaltenango International Poetry Festival. He received the 2022 Premio Gabo, the most prestigious award for Latin American journalism, for his work as co-founder and creative coordinator of Agencia Ocote, an interdisciplinary Guatemalan digital media outlet that views journalism in dialogue with art, historic memory, transitional justice and women's rights. He has participated in many international poetry festivals, and his work is also translated into Bengali, English, French and the Mayan languages Q´eqchí, K´iche', and Kaqchikel. 

Nicole D. Ramsey is an Assistant Professor in Mexican American and Latin@ Studies, as well as Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Her interdisciplinary research centers on blackness, indigeneity, migration, and popular culture, emphasizing a diasporic and transnational perspective. With a focus on Caribbean Central America, she examines the construction of blackness, identity, and nation, particularly exploring cultural productions and performances within Belize and its diaspora in the United States. Nicole holds a Ph.D. in African American & African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Damaris Sanchez is an environmental activist and the Coordinator of Panama's National Network in Defense of Water

Dr. Melanie Y. White is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean Studies in the Department of African American Studies and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminist politics, Black diasporic women’s art, and the histories, politics, and visual cultures of Black Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book manuscript in progress traces a history of sexual and gender-based colonial violence against Black and Afro-Indigenous women and girls from what is today the Nicaraguan and Honduran Mosquitia. Linking this genealogy of racialized, gendered, and territorial dispossession with the centuries-long struggle for autonomy on the Miskitu Coast, she juxtaposes the history of intimate colonial violence in the region with the “anticolonial intimacies” of Afro-Mosquitian women past and present.