Briseyda Barrientos Ariza

Briseyda Barrientos Ariza is a Guatemalan American and first-generation doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where she studies Central American orature. Her research explores how orature and its practice throughout the Central American isthmus and multi-directional diaspora function twofold as a collective de-nationalized revolutionary space comprised of multiple cultural agents and a rhetorical (method)ology that directly opposes colonial narratives, allowing for alternative texts to emerge outside the page. Other research interests include Central American isthmus and diaspora, film, sonic art, archival studies, performance studies, resistance studies, decolonial theory, Black and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, third perspectives, opacity, politics of temporality and memory, cultural autonomy, and sonic- territories and imaginations. Barrientos Ariza is a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow, and a Graduate Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM).

Barrientos Ariza completed a B.S. in English literature and psychology, summa cum laude, from Towson University (2022) and an M.Phil in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar (2024). As a writer, her poetic work has been published and awarded in Grubstreet Literary Magazine (Towson, 2020 and 2021), Reclamation Magazine (New York, 2020 and 2021), and The Trinity Review (Cambridge, 2023). She has also served as an editor of The Scholar Magazine’s 2024 issue entitled This Bridge Called ____. Her most recent academic publication appears in the bilingual anthology entitled Liberation through destruction: From fantastic creatures to marginalized social groups / Liberación a través de la destrucción: de criaturas fantásticas a grupos sociales marginados (2025).

Prior to Yale, Barrientos Ariza worked in philanthropy, providing grant support to grassroots organizations across Central America and the U.S. that advance women and girls’ access to education and sexual reproductive health and rights in the toughest regions to be female and gender diverse. Aligned with the revolutionary Central American poets of the 70s and today, she believes it is imperative that the work of the pen and mouth be tied to the work of the people. She emphasizes that we cannot afford to neglect the archives, narratives, and methodologies that tell of the epistemologies, hearts, and life politics of populations who shape our collective history and future.