Andrés Cadena is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company in the Bogotá office and a member of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) Council. Over the past two decades, he has advised several Latin American governments, as well as major multilateral banks and companies in the financial, consumer goods, and telecommunications sectors. His expertise focuses on strategy and corporate finance, education, economic development, and city management.
Mariano Gomide de Faria is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of VTEX (NYSE: VTEX), a global ecommerce platform recognized as a leader in digital technology by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. With over 25 years in the industry, Mariano plays a pivotal role in overseeing the company’s global growth strategy encompassing marketing, sales, delivery support, and global go-to-market operations teams across 42 countries. He holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from UFRJ and is a respected educator at the EICOM Institute in Cambridge.
Jairo Lorenzatto is the Chief Executive Officer of Smurfit Westrock in Latin America. He was born in Brazil, is a chemical engineer, and has master’s degree in administration from Stanford University.
Over the past 28 years, he has held leadership positions in companies such as Votorantim Cimentos, Ambev, and White Martins.
Sebastian Mejia is the Founder and President of Rappi, a technology company that serves millions of customers, couriers, and merchants across Latin America. Rappi has played an essential role in the transformation of the tech ecosystem in the region. He is an active investor and philanthropist, supporting foundations focused on the development of young leaders, such as the Latin America Leadership Academy (LALA). He also sits on the board of publicly listed Televisa.
Yudi Rafael is an independent curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the curator of Transoceanic Perspectives—a long-term research and exhibition program dedicated to the arts of the Asian diasporas—at Almeida & Dale, in São Paulo, where he curated the solo shows Candice Lin: Hospitality for Ghosts (2023), and Mario N. Ishikawa: Archaeological Site (2023).
Tie Jojima is Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Phillips Collection. Jojima is completing her doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she has focused her research largely on postwar Latin American art. At Americas Society she has co-curated the exhibitions The Appearance (2024), El Dorado: Myths of Gold (2023–2024), Deep Marajó (2023), and Geles Cabrera: Museo Escultórico (2022) and worked as associate curator for Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth (2023).
Tao Leigh Goffe is associate professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on Afro-Asian intimacies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has conducted over a decade of research and teaching on Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. This work is the basis of Afro-Asia Group, which she founded in 2019 for the study of race, art, technology and diaspora. Her essays and art criticism have been published in Asia Art Archive, Amerasia Journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and Artsy.
Kolleen Ku is a PhD candidate in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, working on global modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation project explores the convergence of modernist abstraction, Asian racialization, and alien citizenship through the work of East Asian diasporic artists in the early twentieth-century United States. Originally from Hong Kong, Kolleen received her B.A. from Columbia University in Art History and English. She was the 2023-24 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art. (Photo credit: Marcin J.
Howie Chen is a New York-based curator engaged in collaborative art production and research. He is currently the director and curator of 80 Washington Square East (80WSE) gallery at NYU.
Mariola V. Alvarez is associate professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and director of Graduate Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. She is the author of The Affinity of Neoconcretism: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Brazilian Modernism, 1954-1964, published by the University of California Press in 2023. She co-edited with Ana Franco, New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America with Routledge, which expands the current research by leading scholars in the field.