CONFERENCE 3: IMPERIALISM
Daniela Balanzátegui Moreno is an Assistant Professor in the area of historical and collaborative archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America. Her research is mainly focused on Afro-Ecuadorian historical strategies to survive slavery, structural racism, and gender discrimination. Her investigation is based on the examination of material culture, ancestral territories, historical narratives, and oral traditions of Afro-descendant populations. Since 2012, She has developed a community-based archaeological project in collaboration with Afro-Ecuadorian communities from a feminist standing point of view. The project provides a space for ethical and respectful work in heritage management, public and community archaeology. She obtained her doctoral and master’s degrees from the Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby-Canada.
Maria Paz Gutierrez is an Associate Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program and Master of Advanced Architectural Design in the Department of Architecture at the University of California Berkeley. Her research focuses on the convergence of architectural, engineering, and cultural implications of carbon negative materials and technologies for societies. Dr. Gutierrez’s fieldwork has centered on enclaves under extreme environmental and socioeconomic pressures in the Americas including in the Northwestern Amazon. She was appointed by the US Department of State as Senior Fellow of the Energy Climate Partnership of the Americas (2011-16) leading various multisectoral pilots on sustainable construction innovation and equity in the Americas. Dr. Gutierrez is the recipient of multiple design and research awards including the prestigious 2022 IN DETAIL AWARD (supervisor); Royal Institute of British Architects 2020 President’s Medal of Research Award on Climate Change (shortlisted), 2010 ACSA Creative Achievement Award, 2014 Buckminster Fuller Award semifinalist; Bakar Fellow 2020-22; 2012 Nexus Fulbright Award, Emerging Frontiers of Innovation Award by the US National Science Foundation, 2001 American Institute of Architects Academic Medal. Her research is published in leading architecture and scientific journals, including Science, Nature Scientific Reports, RIBA Journal, Energy & Buildings, and Material Culture. Her contributions havebeen featured in public forums including Science Nation and the BBC.
Jayur Madhusudan Mehta is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Florida State University, specializing in the study of North American Native Americans, human-environment relationships, and the consequences of French and Spanish colonization in the Gulf South. Dr. Mehta earned his PhD in Anthropology from Tulane University (2015) and his MA (2007) from the University of Alabama. He received his BA from the University of North Carolina (2004) and is an avid Tarheel! Dr. Mehta is also a Registered Professional Archaeologist, and he has lead excavations in both the United States and Mexico. Dr. Mehta is also a National Geographic research fellow, and he has published research in the fields of environmental archaeology, ethnohistory, and Indigenous religious and ritual practices.
Everett Osceola is the Seminole Tribe of Florida Cultural Ambassador and a member of the Bird Clan. He is also Founder of “Native Reel Cinema Festival,” the first South Florida Native / Indigenous Film Festival. He is a producer and writer who recently acted in a few feature films and documentaries based in South Florida. Born on the Hollywood, FL Seminole reservation, Mr. Osceola graduated from Valencia Community college with an associate degree in psychology and has worked for various departments within the Seminole Tribe of Florida, including Seminole Broadcasting, Gaming/Casino, and most recently the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum. While working for the museum and under the tutelage of Brian Zepeda, Mr. Osceola learned the art of storytelling and became an outreach specialist for many years. Appointed Cultural Ambassador for the Seminole in 2014 by Chief James E. Billie, Mr. Osceola works in this role to protect the integrity of the tribe while sharing the beauty and history of the people. He is recognized internationally as an expert on Seminole Tribal culture and has spoken across the United States, Germany, New Zealand, and China.
Alice Samson – After an undergraduate degree in languages, and a Masters in Northwest European prehistory focusing on Bronze Age coastal communities and seafaring, Alice Samson turned to Caribbean archaeology. Alice received her PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands on the settlement archaeology of the Indigenous Caribbean and households of the Dominican Republic. She currently co-directs a field project with the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources of Puerto Rico (DRNA/DNER), the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and the University of East Anglia, on Mona island, part of the Puerto Rican archipelago. This uninhabited island has 5000 years of precolonial and colonial history revealed in the archaeology of its many caves and open air sites. Alice is currently a lecturer in Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester in the UK.
José Antonio Sierra Huelsz is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Biological and Agricultural Sciences University Center (CUCBA) at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and courtesy faculty at the School of Forest, Fisheries, & Geomatics Sciences at the University of Florida. His research has included various approaches to understanding and collaborating with community forestry initiatives in Mexico. His breadth of interests has included resource management and governance, forest-agriculture interfaces, tourism and biodiversity, environmental justice, and interaction between knowledge systems. He holds a B.Sc. in Biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a Ph.D. in Forest Resources and Conservation from the University of Florida.
Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, and has published seven books and edited volumes, including her most recent, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State, which won the Best Subsequent Book Award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2019 and a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award in 2020. She has a new co-edited volume entitled, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press). Dr. Speed currently serves as the Past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In recent years, she was awarded the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year Award by the Chickasaw Nation, and the President’s Award by the American Anthropological Association.
Lorena Tezanos Toral holds a BA in Architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana (UNIBE) in the Dominican Republic. She received her master’s in architectural history from the Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya (Spain) and her Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York. She was Assistant Dean of the School of Architecture of UNIBE and co-editor of Archivos de Arquitectura Antillana, a quarterly issue magazine containing a wide-ranging articles and essays focusing on Caribbean architecture and culture. She is professor of Art and Architectural History at UNIBE and academic director of the Amador School. Her research primarily focuses on the architecture of nineteenth-century Cuban sugar mills, combining architectural and pictorial analysis with the examination of historical and literary sources, to analyze discourses of Creole power and African resistance in late colonial Cuba. She has also published on topics related to vernacular Dominican architecture. Her most recent publication is “The Cuban Bohío: History, Appropriation and Transformation” in the edited volume Visual Cultures and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas.
Dell Upton is Distinguished Research Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Art History at UCLA. He previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Virginia. Upton received a B.A. in English and history from Colgate University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. He is the author, most recently, of What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (Yale, 2015) and American Architecture: A Thematic History (Oxford, 2019). Upton’s current research focuses on statues and monuments from antiquity to the present, particularly on rituals of construction and deconstruction of honorary monuments, and on the rural Black landscape in the South from the Civil War until World War II.
Cheryl White earned her PhD at the University of Florida, USA. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities at the Anton de Kom University of Suriname (AdeK), South America, where she is the founder and coordinator of the Archaeology Program and is also the coordinator of the current AfroSurinamese Development Certificate Program. Dr. White’s research explores the decolonization of the African Diasporic archaeological landscape, with particular focus on understanding 17th through 19th century ancestral settlements vis-à-vis its material culture, historical ecological, natural resource procurement and places of collective memory. She centers her research among the descendant Maroon communities of northern South America’s Guiana Shield. Dr. White has published about heritage management, community-based archaeology research practices and the archaeological theory of the African Diasporic. She lives in Suriname with her daughter and husband.
CONFERENCE 2: EPHEMERAL ARCHITECTURE
Denise Y. Arnold holds postgraduate degrees in Architecture and Environmental Studies, and a doctorate in Anthropology from University College London. She has been Leverhulme Research Fellow, ESRC Senior Research Fellow, and Research Professor at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently director of the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, in La Paz, Bolivia, working with the UCLA Modern Endangered Languages Program, and Senior Research Fellow (Hon.) at University College London. Her current interests include artifact-oriented theory and museology issues centered on Andean textiles, and visual languages, oral tradition and non-verbal systems of communication, including new approaches to Andean iconography. Her recent publications include Lengua, cultura y mundos entre los aymaras: Reflexiones sobre nexos vitales(with Juan de Dios Yapita, 2022), Situating the Andean Colonial Experience: Ayllu Tales of History and Hagiography in the Time of the Spanish (2021), and A Critique of Andean Reason (Ed. with Carlos Abreu Mendoza, 2018).
Brenner Billy is a Choctaw tribal member and holds a Bachelor’s of Science from Southeastern Oklahoma State University. He is currently Program Coordinator 2 for the Public Programs Department at the Choctaw Cultural Center in Calera, Oklahoma. In his workplace, he focuses on helping Cultural Educators with the skills necessary to host tours, workshops, classes, exhibitions, and events on the property of the Choctaw Cultural Center. The areas of focus include historical points, Choctaw lifeways, and current Choctaw traditions that are permissible for guests to partake in. He is engaged in Rivercane Restoration as well as Hickory tree research for sustainability in Choctaw basketry and stickball stick making.
Mark Dike DeLancey is Professor and Chair of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University. He received his BA in combined studio art/art history from Oberlin College in 1996, and his Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2004. His research has primarily focused on 19th-20th century palace architecture in northern Cameroon in what was once the eastern-most province of the Sokoto Empire. He is the author of Conquest and Construction: Palace Architecture in Northern Cameroon (Brill, 2016), coauthor of the last three editions of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, 2010, 2000) and has published articles in JSAH, Cahiers d’études africaines, and Islamic Africa. More recently his research interests have shifted to calligraphy, manuscripts, and modern art in Mauritania as well as a side project on the Tomb of Askia Muhammad in Gao, Mali.
Jorge Baracutei Estevez was born in a small rural town in the Dominican Republic and has identified with his Taino Indian roots all his life. Estevez has done extensive research on the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean for over 40 years. He worked as a Museum Program Specialist, Workshops Coordinator and Assistant to Research at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian for 25 years. In 2011 he founded Higuayagua Taino, a group dedicated to research and dissemination of Caribbean indigeneity. In 2022, he published a Reconstructed Taino Language dictionary. Higuayagua members and their children are now re-learning the Taino Arawak language once spoken throughout the Caribbean.
Santiago Giraldo is an anthropological archaeologist who is especially interested in the intersection of architecture, power, and politics among the ancient Tairona peoples of northern Colombia. His research focuses on the ways in which Tairona towns such as Teyuna-Ciudad Perdida and Pueblito were built through time, and what this may say about broader sociopolitical changes among these polities as they expanded throughout the northern and western flanks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta from AD 100 to AD 1600. Since 2010, he has led conservation efforts at Teyuna-Ciudad Perdida along with the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History and broader community development projects throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as Latin America Director for Global Heritage Fund , as well as designing heritage conservation projects in other parts of Latin America. He is also the Executive Director of the ProSierra Nevada de Santa Marta Foundation, where he leads environmental conservation efforts and projects in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Serranía del Perijá of Colombia.
Kenneth G. Kelly, Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Anthropology, University of South Carolina) and Research Professor (Anthropology, Syracuse University), is a pioneering scholar in the multi-sited archaeology of the African Diaspora. His research focused on investigating daily life under plantation slavery in the French Caribbean, and the ways in which African societies engaged with the slave trade in West Africa. Kelly has developed comparative approaches investigating the diverging colonial trajectories of the former French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and explored the differing impacts of the slave trade on state level societies in eighteenth-century Benin, and decentralized societies during the “illegal” nineteenth-century slave trade in Guinea. Publishing over 50 articles and chapters in venues including Ethnohistory, Afriques, Atlantic Studies, and American Anthropologist, his research has been supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, and the National Science Foundation, among others. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1995.
Louis P. Nelson is Professor of Architectural History and the Vice Provost for Academic Outreach in the Office of the Provost. He is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, and West Africa. His current research engages the spaces of enslavement in West Africa and in the Americas, working to document and interpret the buildings and landscapes that shaped the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Working together with archaeologists, Nelson is interested in using buildings to explore Afro-Caribbean culture through the transition from slavery to freedom. He has a second collaborative project working to understand the University of Virginia as a landscape of slavery. His book, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Yale University Press), an intensive examination of the architecture of the island, was awarded the 2017 John Brickerhoff Jackson Prize and the 2017 Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize. Framed around the themes of violence, empire, and identity, the book’s nine chapters carefully investigate the power of architecture in everyday life and Jamaica’s place in the burgeoning British empire of the eighteenth century.
David Sadighian is a scholar and curator of architecture, infrastructure, and material culture in the Modern Atlantic World. His doctoral dissertation at Harvard University examined architecture’s role in the rise of internationalism during the Age of Empire (c. 1870-1914), with a focus on exchanges between France, its African colonies, and the Americas. Selected as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow for the Clark Library’s 2022-2023 Core Program, he is preparing a second research project on informal building practices by fugitive slaves in pre-abolition Brazil and the legacy of insurgent architecture in present-day struggles for land sovereignty. David has produced articles and exhibitions on a wide variety of subjects, from an architectural history of the nineteenth-century Rothschild banking empire to retrospectives of postwar architects Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. He is the recipient of research funding from the Social Science Research Council, the Graham Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, and has published seven books and edited volumes, including her most recent, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State, which won the Best Subsequent Book Award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2019 and a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award in 2020. She has a new co-edited volume entitled, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press). Dr. Speed currently serves as the Past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In recent years, she was awarded the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year Award by the Chickasaw Nation, and the President’s Award by the American Anthropological Association.
Brendan J. M. Weaver is the Lecturer of African Diaspora Archaeology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), and the director of the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (PAHN) in Peru. He specializes in the archaeology of colonial and republican-era labor and enslavement in the Andes, particularly among the African diaspora. Prior to coming to UNCW in 2022, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University (2018-22), Berea College (2016-18), and Queen’s University Belfast (2015-16). Weaver earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Vanderbilt University in 2015.
CONFERENCE 1: ECOLOGY
Michael D. Carrasco is an associate professor in art history and the associate dean for academic affairs and research in the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University. His scholarship draws on diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives to elucidate the origins of writing in the Americas and examine indigenous aesthetics, epistemologies, and ecologies in Mesoamerica and East Asia. Carrasco’s research in these areas has been supported by many internal and external grants, including ones from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), and the Japan Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR). The fruits of this work have appeared in journal publications, such as The Journal of Ethnobiology, Ancient Mesoamerica, The International Journal of Heritage Studies, and The Cambridge Archaeological Journal, among others, as well as the edited volumes, Under the Shade of Thipaak: The Ethnoecology of Cycads in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean (University Press of Florida, 2022), Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica (University Press of Colorado, 2019), Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature (University Press of Colorado, 2012), and Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica (Springer, 2010). He was co-curator with Paul Niell and Lesley A. Wolff of the exhibition Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié (Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University).
Mónica Domínguez Torres is Professor of Art History with a joint appointment in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her Master’s in Museum Studies and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on the arts of the early modern Iberian World, with particular attention to cross-cultural exchanges between Spain and the Americas during the period 1500-1700. Her publications primarily focus on military images and heraldic symbols in post-Conquest Mexico and images and objects connected to the Atlantic pearl trade. Research for her upcoming book Pearls for the Crown (under contract with Penn State University Press) has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, the Bard Graduate Center, and the Renaissance Society of America, among others.
Justin Dunnavant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. His current research in the US Virgin Islands investigates the relationship between ecology and enslavement in the former Danish West Indies. In addition to his archaeological research, Justin is co-founder of the Society of Black Archaeologists and an AAUS Scientific SCUBA Diver. In 2021, he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and was inducted into The Explorers Club as one of “Fifty People Changing the World that You Need to Know About.” This year, he was awarded the 2022 Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence at Occidental College. His research has been featured on Netflix’s “Explained,” Hulu’s “Your Attention Please” and in print in American Archaeology, Science Magazine, and National Geographic Magazine.
Corinne L. Hofman is Professor of Caribbean Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands, and Principal Investigator of the CaribTRAILS project at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV/KNAW). Corinne has conducted fieldwork throughout the Caribbean over the past 30 years. Her research and publications are highly multi-disciplinary and major themes of interest center around mobility and exchange, colonialism, transcultural dynamics, settlement archaeology, artifact analyses, and provenance studies. Corinne’s projects are community-based and designed to contribute to the historical awareness, valorization Indigenous heritage, and open knowledge exchange. Since 1989, Corinne has obtained numerous research grants and prizes, including the NWO Spinoza price in 2014 and the ERC-Synergy Grant for the NEXUS1492 project in 2012. Currently she is a co-PI of the NWO Island(er)s at the Hel project on social adaptation to climate challenges in the (Dutch) Caribbean.
Christine A. Hastorf received her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA. She is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the Director of the Archaeological Research Facility, the Director of the McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory, as well as the Curator of South American Archaeology at the P. A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. She is a Co-Director of the Taraco Archaeological Project on the shores of Lake Titicaca investigating early plant use. She primarily works in highland South America with a focus on food and agriculture via archaeobotanical remains. She has conducted extensive work, involving paleoethnobotany, ritual, agricultural production, political structures, gender, social relations, meaning and the everyday, and the social archaeology of food. She is the recipient of several awards from the Society for American Archaeology.
Irvince Nanichi Auguiste is former chief of the Kalinago of Dominica, the island in the Lesser Antilles with the only constituted legal space for Kalinago communities. He is currently the president of the Caribbean Amerindian Development Organization and has been working also in Saba to celebrate that island’s Indigenous Caribbean population. As part of the project known as Ilanders at the Helm, Mr. Auguiste combines scientific and traditional knowledge to convey Kalinago approaches to climate and sustainability.
Eduardo Góes Neves holds a BA in History from the University of São Paulo and a PhD in Anthropology from Indiana University. He has more than 30 years of research experience in the Amazon Basin and is currently Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of the University of São Paulo, where he is also the director. He has published widely on topics related to the Amazon and has written the books “Sob os Tempos do Equinócio: 8.000 anos de história na Amazônia Central”, “Arqueologia da Amazônia”, co-edited “Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil” and has recently organized the chapter on Amazonian archaeology for the UN-sponsored Science Panel of the Amazon. He has been visiting professor in Universities in Latin America, the US and Europe.
Jonah Rowen is an architectural historian whose research focuses on intersections between architectural technics, economics, materials and commodities, and race, enslavement, and labor. He studies nineteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean colonial exchanges and buildings’ design and production as technologies of risk management and security. He is currently an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the UCLA Clarke Library, where he is researching the architectural history of mahogany extraction. He holds a doctorate from Columbia and a Master of Architecture from Yale and has held faculty positions at schools of architecture across the United States. His scholarship on the architecture of Atlantic slavery has been published in Architecture & Culture, Platform, and Grey Room, with forthcoming essays and chapters on related topics in JSAH,the Aggregate volume on Toxics, Race and the Historiography of Modern Architecture, The Routledge Companion to Race and Architecture, Architectures of Extraction in the Atlantic World, and Architectures of the Caribbean
Glenn H. Shepard, Jr. was born in Georgia and raised in the Tidewater area of Virginia. He attended Princeton University and received his doctorate in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. As an ethnobotanist, medical anthropologist, and filmmaker, he has carried out fieldwork for over thirty years among diverse indigenous peoples around the world, particularly in Amazonia. He has published over a hundred research articles on topics including shamanism and traditional medicine, community-based resource management, the rights of isolated peoples and indigenous appropriations of digital media. He has participated in the production of several films, including the Emmy Award-winning documentary, Spirits of the Rainforest. His research, photography and writing has gained visibility in magazines like National Geographic, The New Yorker, Financial Times and The New York Review of Books. He is a currently a staff researcher in the Human Sciences Division at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he helped curate a recent online exhibit about Kayapó filmmakers (https://archaeology.columbia.edu/kayapovideowarriors/). He blogs at Notes from the Ethnoground(http://ethnoground.blogspot.com/)
Pamela Villaseñor is enrolled in the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians (FTBMI) where she has worked tirelessly to help with the Tribe’s nation-building efforts. Villaseñor is the first California Native woman to serve as the Executive Director of Pukúu Cultural Community Services (Pukúu), the social service non-profit founded by the FTBMI. In this role, Villaseñor supports policy and system change work that uplifts the narratives and resilience of Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples. Prior to joining Pukúu, Villaseñor was the Executive Advisor to the Office of the Tribal President for the FTBMI. As Executive Advisor, she managed tribal government initiatives including the development of the newly established Health and Social Wellness Department. As a passionate champion for Native families, Villaseñor served as the Authorized Representative of the FTBMI for juvenile dependency cases. Additionally, she was part of the team that helped reformed LA County training to include ICWA curriculum nearly a decade ago. Since that time, Villaseñor has been an ICWA Trainer of county case workers. Over the years, Villaseñor has held prestigious fellowships including with Americans for Indian Opportunity’s Ambassadors Program and Native Americans in Philanthropy’s Circle of Leadership Academy, as well as served as a North American Indigenous Caucus delegate for the planning of the United Nations World Conference on Indigenous Peoples. Using the knowledge gained from these experiences, she began helping build the capacity of her Tribe’s Special Projects division and non-profit Pukúu Cultural Community Services over a decade ago. Villaseñor created, led, and participated in numerous projects for the betterment of the people. Her particular interest is the empowerment and wellness of her tribal community, especially initiatives focused on systemic and transformational change. Thus, some of the projects Villaseñor has worked on include violence prevention, cultural arts, economic development, grants management, facilitation and training, and advocacy for the rights of the FTBMI.
