Felipe Ledesma Núñez (Ph.D., Harvard University) is an Ecuadorian artist and historian of sound. He reads colonial archives, studies archaeological artifacts, and molds clay to explore the long history of Andean ritual.
Ledesma approaches archives with the intention of understanding history from a native perspective. He privileges an introspective approach to scholarship—attuned to how natural and otherworldly forces shape perception and cognition, and how colonial epistemes structure his world. He crafts ceramics to break through the colonial silence imposed by symbolic regimes. His listening occupies a site of deliberate impossibility, with ears open to ancestral voices that colonial powers sought to eradicate and lettered epistemologies deem folly.
This approach has yielded remarkable discoveries, including the first known archival documentation of whistling bottles and the earliest reconstruction of a Quechua song.
His work has been featured in numerous international events, including the keynote lecture at the “Sound Faith: Religion in the Acoustic World, 1400-1800” conference at the University of York. He has received fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Society for American Music, and Harvard Horizons. His work appears in Musicology Now, Dumbarton Oaks, and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America.
At Yale, Ledesma is completing a monograph titled Echoes of the Ancestors: Singing Vessels and Quechua Songs in the Central Andes (1650-1670), which examines how highland communities manufactured voice and sound to materialize ancestral presence, and a sound installation titled Uyak/Yaku.
He advocates for students and academics navigating chronic illness and dysregulation.