Lower East Side Community Hero
Nominated by Harry Bubbins, Village Preservation
photo by Whitney Browne
Libertad Guerra is the Director of Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center and former director of the Loisaida Center Inc.
Libertad Guerra is an anthropologist, social and art researcher/historian with 15 years of experience in cultural production and arts management. As former Director of Loisaida Center, Guerra applied her expertise in Puerto Rican, Latino and Latin American social, artistic and community movements in urban immigrant settings to strategic program development and institutional partnerships. The implemented outcome has been Loisaida’s diverse and inter-generational roster of programs, depth of cultural offer at the revamped Loisaida Festival, production of critically and community acclaimed exhibitions.
Libertad’s previous experience includes educator and researcher at John Jay College and Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CUNY); curatorial fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, and independent cultural worker /producer / founder of multi-arts collective ‘Spanic Attack.” She is a Ford Foundation grantee for the project Just X Changes (2020-21), and part of the cohort of Global Arts Management Fellows at the DeVos Institute (2019-2021). Libertad’s is also a member of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts/NY (NOCD-NY), a founding member of the environmental justice coalition South Bronx Unite, and serves on the board of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the local community land trust. Libertad received her Master’s in Cultural Anthropology at Université Laval, Québec, and a second M.A. in Contemporary Art/ Urban Studies/ Museum Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School. Her academic research has focused on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and NYC’s aesthetic politics of place and collaborative art practices in immigrant urban settings; and recently published ‘SovereignTies: The Shared Sovereignty of Trust, Culture, and Land’ for FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art and Criticism.
Resources
UnNCOMMON COMMONALITIES: Aesthetic Politics of Place in the South Bronx by Libertad Guerra