Lorena Rodríguez

Lorena Rodriguez is a peacebuilding and international relations practitioner, multidisciplinary artist, and Rotary Peace Fellow. She holds a Master’s degree in Peace Studies from International Christian University (ICU) in Japan. Her work explores the intersections of creativity, collective memory, and social transformation.

Across the Americas and Asia, Lorena has co-created sensory, artistic, and educational experiences that foster social and environmental justice while nurturing collective imagination and systems rooted in care, well-being, and creativity.

Shaped by more than a decade of learning at the crossroads of ancestral wisdom, art, and science, her practice spans performance, storytelling, poetry, textiles, and culinary art. Through these mediums, she cultivates new ways of relating and opens spaces for dialogue, reflection, and unlearning around diversity, knowledge, and resistance.

In 2023, she co-founded Chicha Fest, a community-based initiative that builds collective art experiences and serves as a grassroots school for sustainable agriculture, art, and science in Sacramento. Lorena has over a decade of experience working alongside Indigenous and folk communities of Abya Yala, as well as Latine communities in California impacted by incarceration and the death penalty—experiences that deeply shape her creative vision.

Rooted in her lived experience as a brown, mestiza, migrant woman, Lorena’s work moves beyond aesthetic contemplation, positioning art as a catalyst for collective care and a medium through which new forms of coexistence can emerge.