Maria Camila Salamandra Arriaga

Maria Camila Salamandra Arriaga is a Colombian lawyer and a current Fulbright Scholar. She belongs to the Afro-descendant women’s group called “Colectivo Wiwas,” which works on ethnic, political, and gender education of Black women in Medellin-Colombia. She is also part of the AfroUdea collective, which works to encourage young Black students at the Antioquia University to be agents of change. As a lawyer, she worked at the Paz y Esperanza Foundation counseling victims of Colombia’s armed conflict in the legal process for administrative reparation. She was also a student researcher on the project “Paths and songs of struggle: Trajectories of women from the Atrato,” combining the two topics that interest her the most: racism and its relation to the dynamics of violence. In addition, she worked in Universidad Del Rosario in a project focused on the area of mining law, advising ancestral and small-scale miners in their formalization processes. Maria is the recipient of a Kroc Institute Fellowship and a Fulbright LASPAU Fellowship.