Javiera Benavente is an artist, cultural organizer, facilitator, and educator dedicated to cultivating transformational communities of practice that are co-creating new futures of care.
Javiera Benavente is an artist, cultural organizer, facilitator, and educator dedicated to creating and practicing collective freedom and new futures of care. Born in Santiago, Chile (Wallmapu) just months before the Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup, she has been deeply engaged with the legacy and failure of this utopian political project and its aftermaths throughout her life.
Javiera’s current work explores collective grief, loss, and memory; cultivating right and reciprocal relations with land and more than human relatives; and communal, embodied practices of surrender and belonging. She is the co-curator of Chile Nunca Más: making memory, making future, an exhibit and memory making project that marks 50 years since el golpe (the military coup) in Chile and the subsequent 17 years long dictatorship.
She serves as the Assistant Dean of Collaborative and Community Engaged Learning at Hampshire College where she is the co-chair of the Decolonization & Reciprocity Working Group. Javiera lives on the ancestral homelands of the Pocomtuc, Nonotuck, and Nipmuc Peoples with her partner, young child, and dog.
