Leonor Caraballo
spirit-in-chief
Leonor worked as a photographer, video artist and filmmaker between Buenos Aires and New York. She won important fellowships and grants, including the Latin American Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts grant and an Eyebeam Art and Technology Center residency. Her experimental videos have been shown internationally in venues such as the Tate Modern, PS1/MOMA, Artists Space, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her critically-acclaimed directorial debut, the feature film Icaros: A Vision, premiered in competition at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Leonor's life on earth expired in January of 2015 but through shamanism and other techniques we continue to work with her, through her and alongside her in a reality she helps create around us.
Matteo Norzi
executive director
Matteo Norzi is an artist, designer, filmmaker and indigenous rights activist. His explorative artistic practice took him through several extensive journeys along six continents. His art has been supported by institutions such as Art In General NY, Headlands Center for the Arts CA, Spinola-Banna Foundation for the Arts Italy. As part of the collaborative duo Isola & Norzi he has exhibited internationally at venues such as Artists Space NY, GAM Turin, NMNM Monaco, David Roberts Art Foundation London, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, Museion Bozen and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. His critically-acclaimed directorial debut, the feature film Icaros: A Vision, premiered in competition at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Bringing with him years of personal experience and extensive research on Amazonian history and culture, Matteo is cofounder and currently serving as the executive director of the Shipibo Conibo Center.
Abou Farman
president
An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou is author of the book Clerks of the Passage (2012, Montreal: Linda Leith Press) and On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020, Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press). He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center. As part of the artist duo caraballo-farman, he has exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern, UK, and PS1/MOMA, NY, and received several grants and awards, including NYFA and Guggenheim Fellowships. He is producer and co-writer on several feature films most recently Icaros: A Vision.
Ximena Saskia Warnaars
board member
Ximena is an anthropologist and activist headstrong about indigenous rights and environmental justice. She started her career studying visual arts and moved into enacting forum theatre and co-creating community performances for social change. Since 2016 she is program officer in the Ford Foundation in the Natural Resources and Climate Change team and leads the foundation's global work on extractive industries. In the Andes and the Amazon she worked with indigenous federations and lived in communities including among the Shipibo Conibo peoples. She set up the regional office for EarthRights International, where as director she was responsible for developing and overseeing the program focused on legal advocacy and environmental justice. She also served as adviser on the Andes Advisory Board for the Global Greengrants Fund and was responsible for identifying and regranting small funds to grassroots organizations working on extractives and climate change mitigation. Ximena has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees in development anthropology from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Lilly Ladjevardi
board member
Lilly has a unique combination of experience in digital storytelling, philanthropic work, and supporting creative talent, having had a varied career exploring music across cultures, producing and representing a diversity of voices. She was a fellow at the youth leadership organization Seeds of Peace and has been co-facilitating youth dialogue groups around issues of identity and belonging. She is currently creating an interactive story in Minecraft about a young family's loss of home during war in Syria and their search for safety across borders with the aim of humanising the experience of refugees for youth in the West. Prior to dedicating herself fully to her passion for working on projects with a social and environmental mission, she worked at the YouTube talent network Maker Studios where she managed some of the most subscribed YouTubers in the world, being at the forefront of video creation for millennial audiences. Lilly graduated from Smith College in 2002 with a degree in Anthropology and International Relations, after spending 3 months in Lamas, Peru as part of a collaboration with the Quechua Lamista.