Anthropologist at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey. Her research focuses on topics related to technology and environmental change. This work has taken her to various research sites across Latin America and the Caribbean, from studying deforestation in Panama to her current project on socio-environmental disasters in Puerto Rico. This latter project documents community responses to Hurricane Maria, the 2020 earthquakes, and the pandemic through oral histories and the preservation of physical and digital materials.

Specialist in preventive conservation and collections management, the humanities and public history, textile history, museology, and archaeology. Her research explores the history of fibers and textiles in the Caribbean and the preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage from a local and decolonial perspective. She has developed and implemented educational, exhibition, research, oral history, preservation, registration, cataloging, and storage initiatives for elements of both material and immaterial cultural heritage. She completed a PhD in History at the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, a master’s degree in Museology: Textile History, Dress, and Conservation from FIT-SUNY, and a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Puerto Rico. She is currently Co-Director of Ecological Culture / Reparative History at Para la Naturaleza. She leads the project Historias Para la Naturaleza, which seeks to make visible voices previously rendered invisible in the organization’s visitor centers throughout the archipelago.

Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Since joining the museum in 2013, she has built one of the leading collections of portraits representing Latinx and Puerto Rican artists and historical figures, contributing significantly to the creation of a more polyphonic history. She has curated or co-curated twenty exhibitions, including UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, by Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar, which received an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Awards for Curatorial Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. Her exhibition 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions received the SECAC Award for Excellence in Exhibitions in 2024, and Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post described it as “...the most impactful and engrossing show the National Portrait Gallery has mounted in a decade.” Caragol directed the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which led to the 2022 and 2025 editions of the museum’s triennial The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. In 2023, she served as guest curator of the Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art. Caragol holds a bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages from the University of Puerto Rico, a master’s degree in French Language and Civilization from Middlebury College, and a doctorate in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is currently a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

She investigates the epistemic and historical-material foundations of capitalist modernity and its sex-gender and racial order, particularly in the context of financial capitalism in the Caribbean. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Zambrana is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), translated by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera as Deudas coloniales: El caso de Puerto Rico (Editora Educación Emergente, 2022). She is currently writing two books, Metamorphosis of Value, which traces the emergence of figures of speculation in the birth of capitalism in the Iberian world of early modernity, and the essay collection Hegel, Race, and Modernity. Zambrana is part of the editorial collective of Critical Times and co-editor of the feminist philosophy series Constelaciones de filosofía feminista (forthcoming with Herder).

A distinguished Puerto Rican archaeologist, educator, and cultural administrator with broad academic and professional recognition in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region. He also has extensive experience in directing and administering educational, professional, and cultural institutions. Until January 2019, he served as Rector of the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, a position he held for fifteen years. Since then, he has returned to his professorship in History and Humanities at the Ana G. Méndez University, Gurabo Campus. For his professional work, he has received the following recognitions: the Order of the Cemí from the Indigenous Festival of Jayuya (1993), the 50th Anniversary Medal of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (2006), the Ricardo Alegría Foundation Medal for exceptional merit in the field of archaeology and culture (2011), and the dedication of Puerto Rican Identity Week by the Department of Education and the government of Puerto Rico (2022). His published books include Tras las huellas del perro indígena(2007), Crónicas Taínas (2011), Cultura, la fuerza que nos une (2014), Arqueología de la Isla de Culebra (2016), El indio borincano y el rey emperador, un encuentro para la historia (2021), and Erotismo y sexualidad en el arte de las culturas indígenas (2024). Archaeologist Miguel Rodríguez López has also stood out in the defense and protection of archaeological heritage. He also supports and participates in the struggle to recover and give value to our Indigenous heritage as an important and active element in affirming Puerto Rican national identity.

Associate Curator of Latino Design and Acting Deputy Director of Curatorial at Cooper Hewitt. Her work foregrounds Latinx and Latin American design within broader global design histories. Most recently, she co-curated Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, a major exhibition featuring newly commissioned installations exploring the meaning of home across the United States, Tribal Nations, and U.S. Territories. She has previously held positions at the Americas Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. De León holds a B.A. from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an M.A. from New York University, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Bard Graduate Center.

Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Utuado Campus. After completing his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, he pursued master’s studies at Texas A&M University and doctoral studies in the Caribbean Archaeology Program at the University of Florida. He later completed postdoctoral studies in the Caribbean Archaeology Program at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is the author of Rethinking Puerto Rican Precolonial History (University of Alabama Press, 2010) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2013). His work has appeared in various professional journals and in several edited volumes on the archaeology of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

is a master’s student in the archaeology program at CEAPRC. He earned his bachelor’s degree (B.A.) in sculpture from Colorado College in Colorado, United States. Coming from a background in contemporary visual arts practices, he has undertaken research projects on wooden boatbuilding in the Caribbean and Caribbean navigation since pre-Columbian times, titled Canoas, Cayucos y Balsas. He also carried out a research project, sponsored by Beta-Local, on private collections of precolonial archaeological artifacts titled Colecciones Arqueológicas Familiares, which in itself became the precedent for his master’s thesis research titled Colecciones Privadas de Puerto Rico. His thesis research seeks to document the voices and histories of collectors and their collections of pre-colonial artifacts through interviews and to photographically document their contents.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She specializes in the anthropology of museums, with a focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of intercultural representation and the formation of national identities. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. Guzmán was part of the inaugural 2024–2025 cohort of the Rooted + Relational research initiative at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CUNY), focused on archives, memory, and the present of Puerto Rico’s past. In 2025, she became co-principal investigator of a three-year Mellon Foundation grant titled Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership, where she leads student co-curation projects and a culminating exhibition at the Stowe Center for Literary Activism. She has held fellowships at multiple Smithsonian institutions, demonstrating her expertise in the stewardship and interpretation of collections and archival materials.

She lives and works between Guadalajara and New York. She is a Mexican researcher and curator. She is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University (NYU), where she completed the Certificate in Culture and Media (Tisch School of the Arts), with an emphasis on ethnographic film and documentary practices. She holds a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College. Her practice brings together ethnography, curatorship, and critical museum studies from feminist and political ecology perspectives, with an emphasis on collaborative methodologies. Her research examines exhibitions, archives, and collections as zones of contact and epistemological dispute. She is currently developing Guardianxs del fuego y terror verde, a project that addresses fire as ancestral technology and communal force in the Purhépecha highlands of Michoacán, exploring its political, symbolic, and affective dimensions in contexts of violence and territorial defense.

An archaeologist interested in the study of anthropogenic landscapes and what they can reveal about adaptive responses to climatic, environmental, and sociopolitical change over time. Her work also explores how environmental archaeology can be better integrated into community projects that seek to confront the challenges of the modern socio-environmental crisis. She is currently a professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University (NYU), where she also directs the Ecological History and Human Landscapes Laboratory. She specializes in the analysis of the physical and geochemical characteristics of soils and sediments, and of their microbotanical remains, particularly phytoliths, in order to reconstruct the geomorphology, hydrology, and paleovegetation of ancient landscapes. Her geographic focus is the Circum-Caribbean, and she has worked at precolonial and historic sites in Puerto Rico as well as at a Postclassic Maya site in Belize. Her research is grounded in the principles of historical ecology in order to trace the legacies of landscape-use practices during the precolonial period, which are an integral though understudied component of the modern socioecosystems of our insular Caribbean, and much of the world.

Artist and educator from Puerto Rico interested in nature and society through a multisensory approach. She creates illustrations, graphic narratives, pigments, and objects in which handmade craft traditions converge with contemporary experimentation. She has researched pigments derived from plants and soils through the creation of watercolors, inks, and mark-making materials, connecting this practice with its history and context. Her academic background in Hispanic literature (B.A.) and in special and differentiated education focused on autism and sensory processing differences (M.Ed.) forms part of an inclusive sensory framework where stories, images, and experiences converge. Rosaura is co-director of Tabonuco, an experiential education project in the mountains of Jayuya, where she co-coordinates and facilitates workshops on art and ecology on the farm. Her narrative and illustrative work is recognized through Días Cómic, a graphic narrative publishing project alongside Omar Banuchi. She is the author and illustrator of the books Temporada(2018) and Materia Materna (2023). These publications and her work with pigments share several common themes: Puerto Rican history, colonialism, the environment, the everyday, stories of daily life, inclusion, education, sensory exploration, motherhood, and community.

Craftsperson by trade, an educator by conviction, a reader by formation, a father, and a self-taught learner in the internet era. He is co-custodian of the farm where the educational and cultural project Tabonuco is located, in the mountains of Jayuya, Puerto Rico. Lately, he spends his time thinking about circular and solidarity-based economies, food sovereignty, and sci-fi anime. He is currently designing and building the foundation of his wooden house.

Multidisciplinary artist from Bayamón, Puerto Rico. He earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, in 2003, and a master’s degree from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, in 2010. He also pursued graduate studies in the History of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean at the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. An artist, researcher, and educator, he has spent around eight years engaged in artistic exploration and in gathering ancestral knowledge about the different fibers and vines used for basketry in Borikén and the Caribbean. For the past twenty years, he has also worked in painting, drawing, and reused textiles on representations of female/Caribbean bodies, motherhood within the socio-economic context, the relationship between the human body and nature, and the spiritual influence of Afro religions.goes here