Visiting Professor Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature

The Kuyayky Foundation (KF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and development of Andean music and culture. KF creates music and concerts, documentaries, produces film-festivals, lectures, workshops and visual artworks, to practice and disseminate Andean cultural heritage. KF has developed and produced a number of collaborative performing arts projects with international artists and international organizations: the dance and music Concert for Peru with the American Red Cross at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium (Miami), Kuyayky Live! (Baden, Switzerland and Washington DC), six Annual Benefit Concerts for the Children of Jauja (Miami, Naples, and Basel) and Xauxa: Back to the Beginning at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts (Fort Lauderdale). KF has also been directly involved in earthquake and poverty relief projects collaborating with the Latin American NGO Un Techo Para mi Pais to build 15 new homes in the Independencia, Humay and San Andres Districts in Peru. And has over the past six years reached more than 4 thousand impoverished children and mothers in the central Andean highlands of the Mantaro valley. To disseminate their work and research on Andean culture KF's members have served as research consultants for both academic and corporate projects, most recently for FIU students doing ethnomusicology field research in the Amazon, and for MTV News producers working on a story on the scissors dance. KF also uses web community building, social media marketing, social entrepreneurship and experience design to reach a worldwide audience. Creating static and dynamic content for its web-portal kuyayky.com, as well as by managing content on third party Web 2.0 platforms. KF's projects have been endorsed by academic institutions and scholars of Andean studies as well as by the Interamerican Development Bank’s Youth Leaders Program, the Smithsonian NMAI & Peru’s Natl. Institute of Andean, Amazonian and Afroperuvian Development (INDEPA),