I am a journalist and communicator with a strong foundation in anthropology and psychology, bringing a unique perspective to storytelling.
Over the past decade, I have written for national and international media outlets and co-produced 34 narrative projects on peacebuilding in collaboration with Colombian creators.
I love doing interviews, writing articles, blogs, and newsletters, designing communication campaigns, and anything that involves telling meaningful stories.
I'm learning to draw in my free time—a hobby, you know. One of those non-monetizable, non-self-optimization activities. My teacher wasn’t too enthusiastic about this sketch, but I found it amusing. Beats a standard headshot.
I co-founded a fellowship in partnership with the Colombian Truth Commission
Creating a program that became an official partner of the Colombian Truth Commission was a significant milestone for me.
The Truth Commission emerged from a peace agreement between the state and the FARC—then one of the largest and oldest guerrilla groups in the world. Sixty years of armed conflict had claimed the lives of over 220,000 people and forced more than 7 million to flee their homes. The Commission was tasked with uncovering the origins and dynamics of the war while giving voice to both victims and perpetrators.
As a journalist, I covered the end of the conflict and the demobilization of over 13,000 combatants. By 2018, after four years of writing for Colombia's leading media outlets, I set my sights on working directly with the Truth Commission. I didn’t yet know how, but I was determined to contribute to its legacy.
By chance, I met Louis N. Bickford, an expert in transitional justice processes worldwide. Together, and in collaboration with the Truth Commission, we co-founded the Viva Voz Fellowship—a program designed to support narrative projects on peacebuilding during the transitional period.
Through this initiative, I co-produced short documentaries and podcasts with five cohorts of talented storytellers, designed training programs, raised funds, and managed communications for the fellowship.
I edited this reel to give our funders, allies, and fellows a glimpse of the work accomplished over these five years. It’s just a snapshot of the amazing projects the fellows created.
I wrote for Global Voices about Oshúm and the Shades of Water, a podcast I co-produced with Viva Voz fellow Lyann Cuartas. This audio-visual series delves into the deep connections Black and trans communities in Colombia’s Pacific region have with rivers. In the article, I offer Global Voices readers a glimpse of Lyann Cuartas's breathtaking photography and the powerful voices of elders from these riverside communities.
Photo: Las Jaibas Productora
In this article, I highlight another project I co-produced as head of Viva Voz. El retorno a Alitayén (The Return to Alitayén) is a short documentary by Sergio Brito, a filmmaker from Colombia's Wayuu ethnic group. The film narrates the story of his clan's forced displacement and their fight to reclaim their land and rebuild their grandmother’s village. In the article, I provide global readers with additional context to better understand this narrative, which is deeply intertwined with the impact of extractive industries that have sown divisions among the communities and clans of Wayuu territory.
Image: still from El retorno a Alitayén, Sergio Britto.
A creator or team pours their heart into researching, scripting, producing, and editing a beautiful story. But then what? Who sees it? What impact does it have? Mecha, the collective behind A Piece of Peace (Un pedazo de paz), a series of animated testimonials from the armed conflict, found an inspiring answer. I wrote about it on Memria’s blog.
Online Visibility and Knowledge Gaps
These three articles are part of a series I wrote for the Visibility Initiative. They are based on a white paper I developed after interviewing over 70 experts in Search Engine Optimization, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Redlining, and gender and regional digital divides, among other topics. Through this series, we sought to highlight some of the limitations and biases of the platforms we rely on daily to understand the world.
In this article, I explore why Google’s search results page is not a window to the world but a stage for an SEO competition where the top positions are almost always claimed by well-funded international organizations. Meanwhile, organizations and individuals from marginalized communities, despite having important messages to share, face significant barriers to achieving visibility on search engines.
In this article, I offer some tough love to Wikipedia, an organization I deeply admire. I delve into why only 20% of the biographies on the platform feature women and why individuals from the Global Majority are underrepresented compared to those from the Global North. I also spotlight the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation and other organizations working to close these gender and regional gaps.
Short answer: Sort of.
Long answer: Large Language Models inevitably reflect the worldview and biases of the groups that dominate the data in their training sets. If certain groups are underrepresented, chatbots may produce responses that misrepresent them or exclude their perspectives altogether.
Illustration: Vincent Roche for Hewlett Packard
I wrote this article for The Visibility Initiative, whose mission is to resurface stories from US-based archives. For this piece, I did a deep dive into the New York Trans Oral History Archive. I discovered that several interviews from different individuals pointed to a remarkable woman often referred to as the Godmother of immigrants and trans people in Queens. Together, these voices map a network of solidarity among Latin American immigrants.
At Memria, we partnered with Invisible Giants, a Senegalese organization dedicated to sharing the stories and celebrating the work of female leaders who have transformed their communities but whose contributions are missing from the internet. Invisible Giants seeks to ignite a global movement to honor our lesser-known changemakers. I took an unforgettable trip to Senegal to envision that movement.
Textos periodísticos en español
