Juan Castrillón, Ph.D.

Juan Castrillón’s research studies theories of listening, media archives, and contemporary healing arts. His work dialogues with contemporary debates about decoloniality, visual and sound/music cultures, and indigenous analytics of the person, space, magic, and technology.

Castrillón is a multimodal cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist with regional expertise in Turkey and the Northwest Amazon in Colombia. His research interests include relations between music pedagogy, theology and critical theory, semiotics, and modalities of inscription. His multimodal work has been published in academic journals; exhibited at film festivals, art galleries, and academic conferences internationally; and distributed among local communities in indigenous languages. He served as board member of the Society for Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA), and he is an active member of the Center for Research and Collaboration in the Indigenous Americas (CRACIA), the Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN), and an alumnus of the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA at Penn). Apart from his academic career, he is a performer of Turkish Sufi Music, facilitator of a music therapy protocol, and pursues Arabic calligraphy and Ney reed-flute training under Turkish instructors.