Felipe Ledesma Núñez 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 the archive from a native perspective and crafts ceramics to counter symbolic silencing. His introspective scholarship attends to perception and cognition, and to the colonial epistemes that shape his world. His ears are open to the ancestral voices that colonial powers sought to suppress and that lettered logics deem folly.
This approach has yielded remarkable discoveries, including the only known archival documentation of whistling bottles and the earliest reconstruction of a Quechua song.
Ledesma lectures internationally, including a keynote at the University of York. His research has been supported by Harvard Horizons, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Society for American Music. He is the first Ecuadorian to receive a PhD from Harvard in any discipline (Musicology, 2025), a path that began at Universidad Estatal de Cuenca and continued through Northwestern State University of Louisiana and SUNY Stony Brook.
At Yale, Ledesma is completing Coya Huarmi: Escuchando al Archivo Colonial | Listening to the Colonial Archive, a bilingual monograph for Dumbarton Oaks on how a seventeenth-century highland community crafted sound to materialize ancestral presence. He is also debuting uYAKu, a ceramics exhibition and sound installation at Miller Hall (February 4–March 6, 2026), and teaching Clay | Sound, a studio-seminar where students think and sound through clay.