Libertad Guerra

Guerra is an urban anthropologist, curator, and cultural organizer and producer with vast arts management experience. She specializes in the startup phase and strategic turnaround of community based cultural organizations using an intersectional approach. She has led the creation of incubation spaces for Latinx cultural producers and educators in NYC. Her academic research and symposia have focused on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and NYC’s social-artistic movements and cultural activism in im/migrant urban settings. Several of her exhibitions have been featured in Art Net best exhibitions of the year, and included in the New York Times list of 10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Lower East Side. In 2020, she became the Executive Director of The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Education Center in downtown Manhattan and was recently awarded the Mellon Foundation grant for New Director’s Vision.

Guerra is a longtime resident of Mott Haven in the South Bronx, where she co-founded the environmental justice group, South Bronx Unite (SBU), in 2012. As a member of the board of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Land Stewarts, Guerra has collaborated in community-based participatory research along with multiple academic partners, and participated in extensive local, citywide and national coalition building efforts on themes of environmental racism, and advocacy for community land trusts and cultural equity.

Her publications include essays in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the edited volume New York-Berlin: Kulturen in der Stadt, and in FIELD: a Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism.

She is part of the Art Against Austerity working group with Social Practice Queens, served as adviser for one of the Design Trust’s Public for All initiatives, is a member of the Naturally Occurring Cultural District network (NOCD-NY), is a Ford Foundation 2020-21 grantee for the JustXChanges initiative, and a recipient of the DeVos Institute Global Arts Management Fellowship (2019-2021).