Aurora Vergara-Figueroa is Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian Minister of National Education and former Deputy Minister of Higher Education, where she advanced equity and access in higher education while shaping national policy. She is the founder of the Center for Afrodiasporic Studies (CEAF) at Universidad Icesi and author of Afrodescendant Resistance to Deracination in Colombia. She has also co-edited I Demand My Freedom with Carmen Cosme Puntiel and the five-volume series Estudios Afrocolombianos: Lecturas Esenciales with Alejandro de la Fuente and Angélica Sánchez Barona.
Recognized by Forbes in 2024 as one of Colombia’s most powerful women, Vergara-Figueroa is widely regarded as a leading voice in Afro-diasporic scholarship. Her recent work continues to foreground Afro-Colombian histories and knowledge production, advancing critical conversations on race, equity, and social justice in Latin America.
Her fellowship project builds on the seminal Afro-Colombia Studies: Essential Readings series, highlighting Afro-Colombian scholars’ epistemic agency in contesting dominant narratives of citizenship, land rights, and cultural autonomy—particularly in the context of Colombia’s 1991 Constitution and Law 70 of 1993.