EDGES International Symposium 2026: Unsettling the Museum

Carlos Barrera Reyes is a visual artist whose practice spans ethnography, experimental archaeology, and social, collaborative, and participatory art. His versatility is reflected in the wide range of formats and materials he has explored throughout his career. He completed a specialization in Marketing at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University and earned a Master’s degree in Arts and Design from UNAM in 2006.

From 2007 to 2016, he served as Deputy Director of Strategic Alliances at the Tourism Promotion Institute of Mexico City’s Ministry of Tourism, promoting the city nationally and internationally. In 2008, he founded Los colores de la tierra, a collaborative project with weavers from 30 communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca, focused on the revival of natural dyeing techniques.

Since 2017, he has been the curator of the Textile Collection at Museo Na Bolom, a role for which he received a FONCA grant to support the preservation, revitalization, and dissemination of the collection. Since 2018, he has participated in the Plumaria de México project, dedicated to reproducing the feather art techniques of ancient Mexico. He is currently a professor and PhD candidate at the Graduate Studies Division of the Faculty of Arts and Design at UNAM.

Francineia Bitencourt Fontes (Francy Baniwa) is an Indigenous woman, farmer, anthropologist, screenwriter, writer, and researcher of the Baniwa people, from the Waliperedakeenai clan, born in the community of Assunção on the Lower Içana River in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Territory, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Amazonas. She holds a degree in Sociology from the Federal University of Amazonas (2016) and a master’s (2019) and PhD in Social Anthropology from the National Museum at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. For more than a decade, she has been active in Indigenous organizations and the Rio Negro movement, working and researching in the fields of Indigenous ethnology, gender, women’s knowledge, objects and collections, museums, Indigenous art, traditional knowledge, memory, narrative, photography, and audiovisual production. Author of Umbigo do mundo: Mitologia, Ritual e Memória Baniwa Waliperedakeenai (Dantes, 2023), she is the first Indigenous woman in Brazil to publish a book in anthropology.

Between 2019 and 2023, she coordinated “Life and Art of Baniwa Women: A View from the Inside Out,” part of the UNESCO–Museu do Índio international cooperation project on safeguarding linguistic and cultural heritage of transboundary and recently contacted Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon. She is coordinator of the Escola Viva Baniwa: Madzerokai – House of Baniwa Ancestral Knowledge in the community of Assunção, and a researcher at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Art, Ritual and Memory (LARMe) and the Center for Symmetrical Anthropology (NAnSi) at UFRJ. She also holds the Olavo Setubal Chair of Art, Culture and Science at the University of São Paulo in partnership with Itaú Cultural, is an affiliated researcher at Princeton University’s Brazil LAB, serves as curator of the Museu das Amazônias in Belém (2025–2026), and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, where she develops the project “From the Inside Out: Living Museums, Indigenous Curatorship, and the Production of New Narratives.”

Giuliana Borea, is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Newcastle University. As a social anthropologist working at the intersection of art, anthropology, curatorial practice and cultural policies, her research explores the political economy of contemporary art worlds, heritage and museums; Indigenous representation and self-representation, and the different epistemologies and sensory practices of place and ecology.  She has served as Director of Museums and Cultural Heritage at the Ministry of Culture and as coordinator of museum projects such as the Chavín National Museum and the Lima Contemporary Art Museum. She was also co-founder of Tandem: Cultural Management for Development, an association that promoted grassroots organisations fostering cultural policies from below. She has held research and teaching appointments at the University of San Marcos, the University of Essex, and the School of Advanced Study -University of London, and maintains a long-standing affiliation with the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She is currently a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at Goldsmiths, and a convenor of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA).

Her current project – the Amazonart Project – examines the work and activism of Indigenous Amazonian artists entering global art circuits and has produced new curatorial narratives through collaboratives practices and co-curatorship with indigenous artists. She has recently co-curated Listening to the Voices of the Rivers (2025) that brought together Indigenous Amazonian artists and UK artists to articulate relational understandings of water, territory, memory, and care. She is the editor of Arte y Antropología: Estudios, Encuentros y Nuevos Horizontes (2017), co-editor of Antropologías Visuales Latinoamericanas: Estudios, Genealogías y Enseñanza (2024) and the author of Configuring the New Lima Art Scene: An Anthropological Analysis of Latin American Contemporary Art (2021), translated into Spanish. She has recently been appointed Lead Curator of the biennial exhibition “Contemporary” (2027-2028) at the Lima Contemporary Art Museum. 

Jamille Pinheiro Dias is Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Co-Director of the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS), School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she is also Senior Lecturer. She is currently leading a British Academy Global Innovation Fellowship on Indigenous filmmaking and environmental education in Brazil. Pinheiro Dias has held visiting professorships and research positions at Duke University, the University of Manchester, Brown, Stanford, and the University of São Paulo. Her research focuses on Indigenous arts, environmental issues, Amazonian cultural production, and translation studies in Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazil, and has been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Environmental Humanities, Radical History, Art and Anti-Racism in Latin America (Cambridge University Press), and the Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter), among other venues.

Leandro Guedes is a museologist, researcher, consultant in collections management and museum documentation, curator of collections, and specialist in digital archives and memory preservation. He holds a degree in Museology from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) and is a master’s graduate and current doctoral candidate in Museology and Heritage at the UNIRIO/MAST postgraduate program. His professional practice focuses on the intersection of technology and culture, with solid experience in managing and documenting physical and digital collections, developing collection and management policies, and promoting new technologies, social memory, and community and traditional knowledge.

Leandro Varison is Deputy Director of the Department of Research and Higher Education at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Trained in both law and anthropology, he completed a doctoral dissertation on the law of Indigenous Peoples and teaches at the University of Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne and at the International Centre for European Training. For more than ten years, he has worked collaboratively with Indigenous communities and organizations, developing projects across a wide range of areas, including human rights, the management and accommodation of cultural differences, Indigenous peoples’ rights, intellectual property law, the protection of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions, and museum collections.

In 2018, he co-authored, with Christel Cournil, the book Les procès climatiques : Entre le national et l’international, which emerged from their collaborative work with citizen organizations engaged in the fight against climate change. Since 2021, he has coordinated collaborations with Native American and First Nations partners for the Royal Collections from North America project at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. He is also co-curator, together with Denilson Baniwa, of the exhibition Amazônia: Indigenous Creations and Futures at the same museum.

Sandra Benites is an Indigenous Guarani Nhandewa woman, educator, anthropologist, researcher, and curator from the Porto Lindo Indigenous Territory in Japorã, Brazil. She holds a degree in Intercultural Indigenous Education from UFSC and a master’s and PhD in Social Anthropology from the National Museum/UFRJ. For over two decades, she has been active in Indigenous movements defending Guarani education and territorial rights, working across anthropology, bilingual intercultural education, museums, decolonial curatorship, Indigenous art, women’s knowledge, territoriality, and memory. Since 2023, she has served as Director of the Visual Arts Centre at FUNARTE, becoming the first Indigenous person to lead the institution. She previously worked as Associate Curator of Brazilian Art at MASP (2019–2022) and held the Olavo Setubal Chair of Art, Culture and Science at USP in partnership with Itaú Cultural. Her curatorial projects include major exhibitions such as Dja Guata Porã: Rio de Janeiro Indígena (2016–2017) and the international show Ka’a Body: Cosmovision of the Rainforest (2021) in London and Paris.

Ṗejuta Ḣaka Win Red Eagle (Oglala Lakota na Waḣpekute & Waḣpetunwan Dakota) is a researcher and fellow at the Science Museum of Minnesota, specialising in Native American ethnographic collections, focused on repatriation, traditional beadwork, and fostering connections between the museum and Dakota communities.