AFROCOLUMBIAN ARTS GROUP

Lizeth Tatiana Meneses Bejarano is a last year student of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering at the Universidad del Valle. During her engineer studies she has conducted research on rural communities in Colombia that do not have access to basic sanitation systems and worked in the designing purification water systems and sewage treatment plants. She is totally confident that using science and engineering are important elements in peacebuilding process.

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Katherine Granja Orobio is a historian and member of the research group on Studies of the African Diaspora in Colombia and Latin America at the Universidad del Valle. She is currently culminating her studies in Political Studies and Conflict Resolution at the same university. She writes about forced displacement of afrocolombian women from the Colombian Pacific Coast and the violence to which they are confronted. She did her internship at the “High Council for peace and Human Rights” at the local governorate, which works for strengthening the observatory about conflict, mining and forced displacement at Valle del Cauca, and especially in the Colombian Pacific Coast.

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Cindy Córdoba has three years of experience in the nonprofit sector. She earned a Bachelor’s degree of Science in Environmental engineering from the National University of Colombia while she was working as a volunteer for different nonprofits organizations: DRECCA Foundation, Creactiva Foundation and Citizen School. Cindy is a fellow of the Frances Hesselbein Institute of University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for her academic and leadership record. She works as an amateur graphic designer creating branding products and editorial pieces for companies and ONG’s. Currently she is part of CIJUKA Foundation, where she provides training in peacebuilding and transitional justice using interactive and graphic tools in the cities of Buenaventura and Cali, Colombia. She enjoys working on the topics of social entrepreneurship, leadership and ethnicity.

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Julieth Balanta Zúñiga is an LLM student at UCLA Law School in the Critical Race Studies program. She is a research member of the Colombian Observatory against racial discriminationODR, a group of lawyers committed to racial and gender justice in Colombia. Currently she is writing on political inclusion of Afrocolombian communities. Her research interests encompass the intersection between gender and armed conflict, alternative mechanism of conflict resolution.