We are a collaborative research working group.
Our team combines expertise in anthropology, memory studies, archival practice, public humanities, art, education, and community-engaged research. This interdisciplinary approach allows us to create spaces where academic inquiry and lived experience inform one another, generating new ways of understanding bodies, histories, and belonging.
María Amelia Viteri
María Amelia Viteri is an anthropologist, researcher, writer, and public humanities scholar whose work explores migration, gender, memory, archives, and social justice across the Americas. Through collaborative research and creative practice, she has developed methodologies that bridge ethnography, artistic inquiry, and community engagement, laying the foundation for the Body as Archive initiative.
As a researcher and storyteller, María Amelia brings a thoughtful perspective to the ways migration, memory, and lived experience shape individual and collective histories. Her work is grounded in the belief that archives extend beyond institutional collections, residing instead in bodies, relationships, everyday practices, and the stories communities carry across generations.
Founder & Research Director
Cristina Yépez
Cristina Yépez is an anthropologist, researcher, and visual creator whose work brings together ethnography, drawing, and testimony to explore new ways of understanding shared histories. Working across research and artistic practice, she investigates how visual storytelling, memory, and collaborative creation can open new possibilities for documenting lived experience.
Through her work with Body as Archive, Cristina embraces research as a creative and collective process—one where images, conversations, and embodied experiences become part of our shared memory. Her practice invites participants to engage with archives not simply as repositories of the past, but as living spaces of reflection, imagination, and connection.
As co-founder of the initiative, Cristina contributes to the development of participatory methodologies, visual materials, publications, and workshops that bridge anthropology, art, and public humanities, fostering accessible and collaborative approaches to memory-making.
Co-Founder & Research Coordinator
Research Associate & Communications CoordinatorMaría Emilia Analuisa
María Emilia Analuisa is an anthropologist, language educator, and researcher whose work explores migration, linguistic justice, memory, and community-based research across the Americas. Her interdisciplinary practice brings together ethnography, multilingual education, and participatory research to examine how language shapes the ways people remember, navigate displacement, and build belonging.
At Body as Archive, María Emilia's work begins with a simple premise: language carries memory, too. Her research invites us to reflect on how language, movement, and emotion shape the stories we tell about migration, identity, and the communities we create along the way. She is particularly interested in the intersections of embodied memory, language, and public humanities, exploring how everyday acts of communication become forms of cultural preservation.