As Co-Dean of Students at the high school, Viviana focuses on the academic, social, and emotional support for individual students. This includes supporting Advisors on a number of priorities such as diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, partnering with our student support team, and involvement in the Community Norms Committee. As a UN child, her commitment to cross-cultural dialogue and understanding has led her to work within communities in the Amazon, and with high-risk youth in low-income neighborhoods in Colombia.

With her deep interest in cultural identity and difference, she carried out post-secondary studies in Colombia, Belgium, and the United States, while completing a BS in international business with a major in international management and negotiation.

Viviana, a multidisciplinary artist, is a member of the 9-12 faculty teaching visual arts. Influenced by being born in Chile to Colombian parents and having grown up across the Americas, her works address ideas about borders, boundaries, and shifting identities. Viviana had a calling to work in the arts & humanities that led her to earn her BFA in studio practice and art education and her MA in human studies with a focus on narrative. As a graduate student, she studied the relationships between discourse and drawings, prints, and ethnographic photographs, and she wrote a book on the history of photographic representation of the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada in Colombia, which was awarded the National Award in Cultural Studies (2014).

Viviana moved to Pasadena from Medellin, Colombia, where she taught at art and design colleges – courses on experimental design, fieldwork for design, art history, and installation art. She is passionate about learning about the ways we see and shares her enthusiasm for the world around us with her students. When she’s not teaching, making art and books, or doing research for documentary films, Viviana loves reading, walking, and dancing.