Lydia Degarrod

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Ph.D. is both a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who creates installations that blur the line between ethnography and art in order to convey experiences of extraordinary nature and address issues of social justice. Her latest work Geographies of the Imagination explored the inner images of exile.
As a cultural anthropologist, she has conducted research and published on shamanism and dream interpretation among the Mapuche, one of the native peoples of Chile, and also studied popular cultures among urban Chileans. For her research, she has received a Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Research Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, a senior fellowship at Harvard University, and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. Recently, she was an invited participant of the Eranos Annual Symposia in Switzerland.
As a visual artist, Lydia has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has received awards for her work from the Wing Luke Memorial Museum of Art, Saint John’s University and the Ministry of Culture of Chile. She has been Artist in Residence at California State University at Chico, De Young Museum of Art, and the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts.
She has taught at Occidental College, Bowdoin College and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod is an Associate Editor of the Journal for the Society for Anthropology of Consciousness. She serves at the Advisory Board of the Asian American Women Artists Association, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Integral Studies.