Vanessa Terán Collantes is an artist, visual anthropologist, and educator whose work explores migration, belonging, and place-making through collaborative practices in photography, video, and oral history. Her current research-creation project examines Andean migration across the highlands (Quito, La Paz, etc.) and the Northeastern Woodlands (Connecticut, Montreal, etc.), foregrounding territory not as a passive backdrop but as a relational web of humans, non-humans, institutions, and histories. Drawing on the ontological turn in anthropology—particularly relational ontologies articulated in Indigenous thought and feminist theory—her work investigates how migrants and territories co-constitute subjectivities through sensorial practices and memories.

She holds a BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts (New York) and an MA in Visual Anthropology from FLACSO-Ecuador. In 2023, she was awarded the Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellowship at Yale University, where she developed Sucúa Haven, an ethnofiction project created in collaboration with the Ecuadorian diaspora in New Haven that forms the basis of her current research. Beyond academia, she is committed to collaborative methodologies that foster dialogue with diasporic communities and open new frameworks for reimagining migration and belonging.