As a healing artist-scholar, River’s decolonial practice integrates research and facilitation, writing and translation, and performance and visual media.

Their body of work connects disparate fibers, thematically and modally, in the reimagining of a world oriented toward holistic wellness for all. Weaving grief with hope, they seek to contribute to transmutations of structural vulnerability into power, grounded in greater personal alignment, collective empathy, and environmental responsibility.

CV

Storytelling

River’s storytelling practice dances between ancestral and personal memory, documenting and sharing embodied and (auto)ethnographic knowledge through (collaborative) performance, visual media, and writing. They often work within magic (as) realism and in the languages where they have found homes: Spanish, English, and Quechua/Kichwa.

Notable Projects:

Research

River is a mixed-methods cultural, medical, and applied anthropologist. Their current research is inspecting community care and holistic wellness within LGBT+ chosen kinship networks in their home country of Ecuador. In all their work, they prioritize accessibility and reciprocity, as well as opportunities that center historically disenfranchised stories.

Recent Appointments:

  • Trustees Doctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Central Florida (2025-)

  • Senior Survey Research Analyst, AmeriSpeak, NORC at the University of Chicago (2022-2024)

Facilitation

River is passionate about multimodal creative and learning facilitation. As a public speaker and educator, they invite their audiences to expand their understandings of and participation in knowledge creation. While also offering practical skills, their practice grapples with resisting limiting social structures and connecting across differences.

Example Engagements:

  • Workshop Facilitator, Performing Patient Care: Delivering Difficult News, College of Medicine, University of Central Florida (2026)

  • Panelist, Invisible versus Visible Disability, Havas x We Create Space (2025)

  • Keynote Speaker, Trans Day of Visibility, University of Chicago (2024)