Juliana Ramírez Herrera specializes in the arts and archaeology of the Indigenous Americas, particularly those of the so-called small-scale societies from pre-Conquest and early colonial Panama, Colombia, the Caribbean, and Amazonia. Her work engages with the spatio-temporal dislocations that have brought Indigenous material culture into contact with Western art historical and archaeological discourses. She is particularly interested in historiography, collecting practices, museums, and the ethical challenges of researching and teaching primarily looted material. Her research examines narratives of displacement—both real and conceptual—that have uprooted Indigenous peoples, their objects, and practices from ancestral lands and ontologies. She also explores the possibilities of a restitutive art history—one that embraces multitemporal approaches to challenge the colonial legacies of modern Western linear paradigms of time, progress, and heritage.
Her first book project, tentatively titled Astronauts in the Rainforest: The Metallurgy of Darién, examines the entangled histories of metal body ornaments in the Colombia-Panama borderlands, from pre-Conquest gold to twentieth-century silver-coin jewellery. At the heart of this inquiry is a beaded necklace gifted by the Emberá leader Antonio Zarco to the American anthropologist H. Morgan Smith, following their collaboration at the US Air Force’s Tropical Survival School in the rainforests of Darién, where NASA astronauts of the Apollo missions learned survival skills with the aid of Indigenous people. This unlikely encounter between the rainforest and outer space—and between art history and space archaeology—opens up a methodological and conceptual field for studying displaced, destroyed, and stolen pre-Conquest Indigenous metalwork from Darién as active agents (satellites) in constellations of resistance. Astronauts in the Rainforest thus advances a transtemporal analysis that centers Native body ornamentation in gold and silver as an enduring, trans-ethnic form of Indigenous resistance from the early sixteenth century to the present. Rather than treating the absence of archaeological context as a barrier, the book draws on Indigenous epistemologies and Western ethnohistorical and ethnographic narratives of Native violence, sodomy, and cannibalism to reconceive context as relational, dynamic, and enacted through exchange, challenging the disciplinary insistence on fixed, stratified models of time and space.
Recent publications include “Fragmentation as Skilled Practice: The Aesthetics of Making and Breaking in Sitio Conte, Panama (750–1050 CE)” (RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics) and “The Bio-Art History of Care: Mummy-Sculptures of the Atacama Desert” (Sculpture Journal). In 2024 and 2025, Juliana was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, where she collaborated with curators Sequoia Miller, Karine Tsoumis, and Francesca Herbert-Spence on the multi-million-dollar renovation of the museum’s ground floor. As part of this project, she reconceptualized and curated the former Ancient Americas gallery. The new exhibition, Ancestral Abiayala, features ancestral Indigenous ceramics from across modern-day Latin America displayed alongside select contemporary works from the region. Centering these belongings as living witnesses to histories of ritual, forced displacement, and survival, the gallery marks a first step in the museum’s commitment to ethical stewardship and renewed relationships with communities of origin.