Teresa Cisneros

Teresa Cisneros, Senior Practice Manager, Culture Equity Diversity Inclusion, Wellcome Trust, London, UK

Teresa Cisneros is a Chicana Londoner from the Mexico–Texas border – ‘La Frontera’. She practises where she is from, not where she is at. A ‘curandera’ and recovering colonial administrator, she is currently the Senior Culture Equity Diversity Inclusion Practice Manager at the Wellcome Trust. However, she prefers the title ‘Curator of People’. She has recently been working with the Wellcome Collection, where she has conceptualised, instigated and created the framework for their mandatory Social Justice Curriculum. Cisneros received a grant to deliver ‘Object Positions’ at the Showroom Gallery in 2016, exploring cultural equity, decolonial processes and colonial administration. She has worked with numerous institutions, including Nottingham Contemporary, Goldsmiths and University College London, in the fields of care, policy-making, learning, colonial infrastructures, institutional/behavioural change and rethinking institutional power dynamics. In 2018, she published Document 0, a publication exploring our inability to ‘diversify’ the arts and her own complicity in it. She is interested in reconstructing systems and institutions to work towards transformational and institutional justice by creating the systems to hold staff accountable for their bad behaviours. Cisneros centres her life and work practice in collaboration, care relations and collectivity.