Plastic Artist

Alejandra Ortiz de Zevallos is a sculpture graduate from the Faculty of Art and Design at PUCP. Her practice moves between public and private space; on the one hand, through weaving she delves into the act of repair and reconnection with the body and nature, using organic and recycled fibers as raw material. On the other hand, she develops collaborative projects that seek to generate dialogues with the other and the natural environment through weaving and participatory dynamics that undo physical and cultural boundaries. In the last 3 years she has developed different transdisciplinary collaborations around the Surco River, a pre-Hispanic channel buried under the city of Lima. He has participated in group exhibitions in Peru; the exhibition Khipu exhibited at MALI in 2020 and ¨La posibilidad de lo común¨ at Galería del Paseo in 2021, he is also part of the collective Entre Ríos at the University of Essex, England.

Sociologist

Céline is a French-Peruvian anthropologist; she has devoted herself to social science research at the IHEAL- Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine de La Sorbonne in Paris. Specialized in history and anthropology, she is also passionate about photography. She is currently developing a research project in Peru for Mater Iniciativa using anthropological methods with the practice of photography to photo-document food production chains, aiming to understand the challenges of agricultural production for small farmers in the Cusco region, as well as the social relations that arise around crops.

Photographer

From an early age he started in the world of audiovisual communication, specializing in gastronomic and product photography, contributing for several years to Mater Iniciativa with the production of images and videos for the development of different projects. He currently runs his own digital agency “Fotograf” collaborating with brands for the production of audiovisual content.

Object Designer/3D Ceramist

Cindy Valdez was born in Peru, where she studied Arts and Design for two years. In 2012 she was accepted at the Berlin University of the Arts where she started studying product design. In 2018, she starts her master studies at the Weissensee School of Art in Berlin under the supervision of ceramics professor Barbara Schmidt. As an artist, she has participated in different exhibitions in Europe and has had the opportunity to do different internships and workshops in Europe and South America. She currently lives in Berlin and is finishing her master thesis in product design.

Anthropologist

Daan Overgaag is a Dutch anthropologist and cook. He studied Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Utrecht with emphasis on anthropology. From the age of 17 he started to train in cooking by working in different restaurants in the Netherlands. As part of his degree project he traveled to Peru to do his thesis in cultural anthropology together with Jesper Nass on the social impact of Peruvian gastronomy. Inspired by the potential of gastronomy as a vehicle for change and using the connection between anthropology and gastronomy he is developing the project Traceability for Mater Iniciativa.

Linguistic

Daniela Salcedo was born in Peru. She has a P.H D. in Hispanic Linguistics from The Ohio State University and currently teaches Spanish at Princeton University in the United States. In addition to research in sociolinguistics, Daniela is passionate about reading and writing, and enjoys telling and listening to stories. In her time at Mil, she conducted a pilot study on creative reading and writing. To do so, she interviewed various members of the neighboring farming communities, framed around issues such as memory and the need (or not) to keep a record to document their traditions and practices as a legacy for future generations.

Creator of audiovisual content in Mil and Mater Iniciativa, Born in Lima, Erick has an interesting and multifaceted experience.
He has been champion and international ambassador of Fuchiball in Latin America, photographer for Cosas magazine, photo editor for 15 Minutos magazine in Peru, studied bar, cooking, photography, drawing, sculpture and illustration.
His trajectory with Virgilio started in 2012 doing photography with the restaurant, then he returns as a beer supplier with his brand Blur Homebrewing, after the pandemic, he started to be part of the bar team in Mil and now he is focused on making audio, photography and video records of the projects carried out by Mater Iniciativa from Cusco with the aim of keeping alive the ancestral traditions of his country.

Anthropologist

Francesco D’angelo is an anthropologist graduated from PUCP. He has conducted several research projects in peasant and native communities in Peru. His work has a participatory and communal approach. He is currently conducting visual anthropology projects focused on the peasant economy.

Art Historian

Gaby Greenlee is an art historian who researches and writes on Indigenous value and process in objects and imagery of the pre-contact and colonial Andes. Her subject matter includes Indigenous textiles as well as conceptions of landscape and the ambiguities of experience in the colonial space. She is a visiting lecturer in art history at Santa Clara University in 2022-23 and will also be a post-doctoral fellow this year through the Marilynn Thoma Foundation in Art of the Spanish Americas, focusing on writing and research that extends from her dissertation, Inka Borders and the Power of Volatility: on the Fringes and Edges of Textile and Territory. She does most of her living and writing from a small perch in Santa Cruz, California, a beautiful place of early morning fog and warm midday sun.

Textile Designer

She was born in Rome in 1991, and from an early age she felt an inclination to know different cultures. She began her artistic career at the Academy of Arts and New Technologies in Rome in 2010, graduating as a Product Designer. Subsequently, she was selected for a degree at the Eindhoven Design Academy in Holland, where her interest in natural fibers and traditional techniques was born. During those 4 university years she traveled to Italy, Germany, Holland and Peru to expand her knowledge in local techniques and develop projects based on sustainable fashion.

Anthropologist

Dutch anthropologist and cultural sociologist. Together with Daan Overgaag, he traveled to Peru to conduct research as part of his thesis for the BA program in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. His research focused on Peruvian gastronomy as a tool for social development. Jesper has worked as an intern for the ethnographic museum Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, where he helped in the creative process of developing an exhibition on cultural biodiversity. He is currently finishing his master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management.

Doctor, Researcher

Malena Martinez studied medicine at the San Martin University in Lima, Perú. She did her serums with the Peruvian Navy in Iquitos, and then returned to Lima to work in a laboratory and specialize in pathology. Subsequently, she took a specialty in Nutrition and food industries. It was then that Virgilio Martinez (her brother, chef at Central) suggested the idea of researching Peru and its biodiverse ingredients. This is how Mater Iniciativa was created, a biological and cultural research center, of which she is the current director, in addition to being the manager of the restaurants Central, Kjolle, Mayo (Lima) and Mil (Cusco).

Beverage Researcher

He was born in Toribio Casanova, between the highlands of Perú and the Amazon. Since he was a child, he saw his father working and healing with medicinal plants, mainly from the mountain range, which he collected in the farm or in the forest. After finishing school, he travels to Lima where he works in a restaurant, and then decides to study the career of Bar, specializing in craft cocktails. He has taught in Urubamba where he gave value to the traditional drinks of the region. Today he runs Mil’s bar and works with Mater Iniciativa experimenting with ferments and distillates.

Archaeologist and Gastronomist

Marc Cárdenas was born in Barcelona. He is an archaeologist and gastronomist with a focus on the study of food as a structuring element of social and cultural events. He has worked on research projects with the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the CSIC-IMF research center. He studied cooking at the Basque Culinary Center, where he worked at Restaurant Compartir and Hispania Brussels. His interests are linked to transmit, from an alternative didactic, the importance of food and its environment. With Mater Iniciativa he carried out a bibliographic review of Moray from an archaeological point of view.

Hospitality Specialist/Experience Creator

Maria Pottage has a clear passion for everything related to food and drink. Graduated in Business Administration at Univ del Pacifico (Lima), she participated in the Master of Food Studies with emphasis in Culture at NYU. With more than 15 years of experience, she has worked in different roles in the industry. On the Editorial side, she worked as an Editorial Assistant for Saveur magazine, and as a Secret Ingredient Researcher for the Food Network’s “Iron Chef” and “Chopped” shows.
Maria has earned numerous accolades including being named “Next-Gen Bev master” by the Miami Herald’s Indulge magazine. She has been a key player in the planning and opening teams of prestigious restaurants in Miami, leading the Beverage and Operations areas. She went from working as a bartender in Hawaii and NYC, to creating and managing multiple successful Beverage programs. In Operations, she has managed from independent restaurants to an internationally recognized food hall (“Time Out Market”) helping to bring it out of the crisis brought on by the pandemic.
In her spare time she enjoys traveling, visiting restaurants and bars, nature, books and photography.

I’m Melissa Loayza, I’m Bolivian and I work in the kitchen area of Central, I’ve been part of the team for a year and as a cook. This trip has been very enriching and inspiring, not only from the gastronomic knowledge, but also from the value and impact that communities have in the kitchen.

Chef

After having completed her studies of gastronomy at the institute, she travels to Chile in search of new knowledge and a new perspective of the “Haute Cuisine”. Here, she starts doing an internship in Boragó, opening the panorama of what is a gastronomic philosophy, after a year and a half she returns to Peru in the search of er own culture and arrives at Astrid and Gaston, where she learns a new cuisine and a lot about discipline; Then she arrives to Central where she opens her mind to a new philosophy, where history, culture and art are rescued in a dish, it is here where Sharon says, she better understoon her roots and how art can be expressed, in a way that it can represent spaces and people; that the culinary world can be multidisciplinary, Mater a magical place for people who like to investigate and go to the field; Then he came to Mil in Cusco, where everything is more real and in direct contact with the product, the producer and nature; she travels to other countries such as Mexico, South Korea, Brazil, Bolivia; where he learns new cultures, and works for a short time in each place to rescue information and connect with people. Now she is in the jungle in the Amazon of Peru, in Chachapoyas, Cocachimba working in direct contact with the products in Goctalab; a gastronomic laboratory, a multidisciplinary place; and she is doing her research as a journalist; her second career and she tells us that “research is a movement that has no end”.

Plastic Artist

Valeria Figueroa is a sculptor from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She has been dedicated to research and production of ceramics for five years. She has led workshops with ceramists such as Aura Luz Pilco, traditional ceramist from the community of Chazuta, as well as with Carlos Runcie Tanaka. She was part of Taller Dos Ríos where she worked as a production assistant and teacher. She has participated in various group exhibitions and held her first solo show “Fosa Común” in September 2018.

Nutritionist, Cultural Manager

Veronica Tabja is a Peruvian Nutritionist with specialization in Public Nutrition and Cultural Management. Her area of work is the management of social and artistic-cultural projects. She has been co-founder of Cultiva Lima, an urban-environmental education association, and creator of the educational program for the international exhibition Conversations with Mother Earth, exhibited in several countries. She currently directs the area of Art and Culture of Mater Iniciativa where she develops collaborative, transdisciplinary projects with both local and international artists, and members of the rural communities neighboring Mil. She is also co-founder of FIX Cold Pressed Juice, a company dedicated to the production of organic juices, closely working for ecological farmers in the region por Lima.