Diana Gutiérrez is a Colombian anthropologist, dancer, mother, scholar and educator is the co-founder of Embodying Reconciliation - Cuerpos para la Reconciliación, a non-profit international organization that uses bodily, artistic, anthropological, academic and therapeutic tools to help facilitate processes of personal and collective transformation, reconciliation and peace-building with different communities around the world. She has undertaken roles of a dance researcher and teacher with children and young people in schools and universities in Bogotá; facilitator of dance therapy workshops with older adults and with women deprived of the freedom in prisons in Bogotá; coordinator and associated research member with Biodiversa Colombia Foundation in the areas of cultural heritage, applied and visual anthropology, ethno-biological, socio-economic and environmental education with emphasis in participatory and applied methodologies. Her thesis work for Choreomundus, an International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage (2013-2015), she compared how children learn and use their dance heritage in Colombia and France. She was then inspired to launch the Seeds of Heritage project, an online platform that supports processes of collective and personal reparation through collaboration between ICH stakeholders in Colombia. Additionally, in 2016, she created the “Ephemeral Reconciliation Museum” in Galeras, Sucre, Colombia, an artistic and participative laboratory to give the community an opportunity to share their experiences and emotions in the presence of illegal military groups such as FARC y “paramilitares”. Lastly, her current project since August 2018 involves the development of the Mola Museum in Panama City with the aim of safeguarding and making visible the uses of the Mola, an ancestral intangible cultural weaving practice of the Gunadul indigenous people of Panamá and Colombia.
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