Teresa Morales

Teresa Morales studied Anthropology at Dartmouth College (United States) and Mexican History at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has been a research professor at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México (INAH) since 1981.

In 1985, she began working with the local communities of the State of Oaxaca in the creation of community museums, together with her husband Cuauhtémoc Camarena. The objective was to provide the necessary tools for indigenous and peasant communities to build their own spaces to strengthen their identity and memory.

To date, the couple has helped shape 24 community museums in the state of Oaxaca. In addition, they also helped create the Unión de Museos Comunitarios de Oaxaca in 1991 and the Unión Nacional de Museos Comunitarios y Ecomuseos de México in 1994.

In 2000, they fostered the creation of the Red de Museos Comunitarios de América, a network they now advise and that currently brings together community museums from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia.

Morales and Camarena’s most famous texts include Memoria: Red de Museos Comunitarios de América. Experiencias de Museos Comunitarios y Redes Nacionales (2016) and El museo comunitario: un espacio para el ejercicio del poder comunal (2009).

In 2010, Teresa was awarded the Prize for Innovative Work in Museums from the Hans Manneby Memorial Fund for Museum Development in Sweden.