Cristina Veran

Cristina Verán’s interests reside at the global intersections of politics and culture—especially with regard to music, visual and performing arts, design, journalism and creative media, community socio-economic development, and philanthropy.  As an international Indigenous Peoples focused specialist, her work—as a researcher, educator, advocacy strategist, media maker—is particularly engaged with themes of human rights, decolonization, mestizaje and re-Indigenization. Her re-emergent creative practice speaks to such themes as well, in the form of tangible design objects.

Among her current teaching and writing endeavors regards the rise of Indigenous contemporary music, visual and performing art(s), film, and tech, as well as Indigenized expressions of popular culture around the world. Regarding such themes and their socio-political undercurrents, she produces an ongoing series for Cultural Survival Quarterly and its regular online media.

As a longtime NGO consultant and correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, she was a founding member of the UN Indigenous Media Network and, later, the UN Indigenous Language Caucus. Her sustained engagement continues as pertains to arenas including the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII,) the Committee to End Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW,) and the UN Fourth Committee on Decolonization.

Cristina has been an Op-Ed contributor for El Diario La Prensa, IDAR/E, and the Women's Media Center, and is an Advisory Council member for the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, a non-profit organization that supports strengthening democracy through journalism and a free press in Native American communities. Adjacent to these arenas, she previously served as Consultant to the Ford Foundation for its Committee on Indigenous Peoples international funding initiative.

She earned her Masters Degree in Indigenous Studies from the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i, during which, she was an APLP Fellow-In-Residence at the East-West Center—a think tank established by the U.S. Congress to promote transnational collaboration across Asia and the Pacific Islands (and for which she has served two terms as Alumni Advisory Board member for the Center’s leadership programs.) Cristina also completed a Graduate Certificate in the Filmmaking for Social Research Program at the University of Hawai’i Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She has a BA in Media Communications from Hunter College [CUNY].

Cristina has guest-lectured extensively at universities, museums, cultural institutions, and symposia—from the Field Museum in Chicago to Te Papa National Museum of New Zealand to Australia’s international Adelaide Festival of the Arts, and beyond— and served on the Programming Committee for the Pop Conference at USC Thornton School of Music. She was part of the Museology & The Mused group and Indigenous Futures cohort convened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017.

Meanwhile, Cristina is an editor for the forthcoming volume of the Global Hip-Hop Studies Journal, and is collaborating, as editor, with Māori hip-hop legend and filmmaker Dean Hapeta Te Kupu of Aotearoa New Zealand’s pioneering, politically militant rap group Upper Hutt Posse, on what stands to be the first-ever Indigenous hip-hop autobiography. She previously served as editorial consultant to and associate editor for the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop,

During her teen years Cristina was, herself, a rap artist—inspired by the harmonizing sounds of pioneering performers Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Bros.—and she has been a proud member of genre-defining early New York hip-hop collectives from New York including TC5 and the Rock Steady Crew—widely credited among the first to inspire Indigenous youth around the world to become part of the now-global hip-hop cultural movement.

Her extensive documenting of its music, dance, and visual art elements, as well as social and political contexts—from its Bronx beginnings to the myriad global incarnations—featured widely during the heyday of hip-hop journalism, in publications such as Vibe, The Source, Oneworld, and others. And she served as guest editor for the special edition of Rap Pages devoted to hip-hop dance, a coveted collectors’ item among enthusiasts worldwide.

Cristina’s history of pioneering female MCs in the 1970s and '80s, “First Ladies,” leads the anthology Hip Hop Divas and another, documenting the beginnings of hip-hop dance forms, “The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the B-Boy Kingdom,” is part of the volume Vibe History of Hip Hop, among other notable book contributions. Her chapter “Native Tongues,” featured in the anthology Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, presents Indigenous hip-hop histories and worldviews of cultural practitioners from the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.

All of which confirm her as a singular authority on the movement, to which her personal story has intertwined throughout.

Meanwhile, a current research project and curatorial initiative in development, very close to her heart, seeks to weave together more than 500 years of music, art, and performance celebrating, inspired by, and also created by artists—plural!—named Tupac. Most prominently among them, Túpac Amaru II, the great anti-colonial Indigenous leader and icon from 18th century Peru, and the late African-American rap artist Tupac Shakur, who was named for him and should rightly be credited for making this shared and illustrious moniker one now known in nearly every corner of the globe.

Raised and residing in and around NYC, Cristina is originally from Lima, Peru; a dual national and global citizen whose work and related interests have brought her thus far to 38 countries, on every continent, many islands, and among Indigenous territories throughout. She is a weaver of networks, ideas, and one day perhaps, of textiles such as those her ancestors in the Andes left as testament for the ages.