Cultures at Risk Presenter Biographies

Cesar Humberto Cotacachi Velásquez

Ecuadorian traditional music:
Cesar Cotacachi   Luz Cotacachi   Raul Conejo

Cesar Cotacachi was born in 1972 in Otavalo, Ecuador. He studied ecology at the San Francisco de Quito University and got his B.Sc. degree in 1998. In 2003 he finished his master’s degree in communitarian natural resources management at the Catholic University in Ecuador. He works in diverse locations such as Galapagos Island, Tiputini Research Station in the Amazon rain forest, Otavalo Municipality and different NGOs as an environmental, social, tourism and cultural projects manager. He is an indigenous researcher in Ecuadorian Andean living cultures, has written three books and has participated in many Christian musical events in Ecuador with indigenous traditional music. He plays the charango, quena, rondador, pingullo, pifano, gaita and others traditional instruments. He has recorded traditional Andean music in a joint project with Centro de Estudios Pluriculturales-CEPCU (an indigenous NGO) and the Inter American Foundation (IFA) and Heifer Project International (HPI). His present focus is work on an indigenous film about Andean music, especially from Otavalo and Northern Ecuador.