Our Board of Directors

Luis T. Castillo

Mr. Castillo is the president and founder of International Technologies Corporation, which has been involved in the engineering of numerous projects such as Lincoln Center in New York, Pompidou Center in Paris, Lloyds Headquarters in London, L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, The Siam Commercial Bank, in Bangkok, Thailand and the Prutrayaya Housing Project in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  He was born in Colombia into a family of politicians, journalists and writers, graduated from McGill University in Montreal with an engineering degree and then moved to the United States, which he made his permanent home. His novel Echoes of Time (Tigress Publishing, 2009) was inspired by his research at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, on the San José, a Spanish galleon that was sunk by British warships in 1708.  He has led recent efforts to carry out the sub-sea recovery of Spanish galleons. He lives with his family in Seattle and New York, where he works and writes.

AMALIA CÓRDOVA

Ms. Cordova is the Latino Curator for Digital and Emerging Media at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  For over a decade, she was a Latin American program specialist for the Film + Video Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. She has served as Assistant Director of New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU. She is from Santiago, Chile.

ROMOLA LUCAS

Ms. Lucas is a transactional Attorney in private practice in New York.  Her firm represents clients in tax, estate planning, small business, non-profit, and real estate matters.  She is a Founder of the Caribbean Film Academy, Inc., a New York not-for-profit, created to support and share the work of Caribbean filmmakers in the Region and Diaspora.  Created in 2012, the organization hosts film screenings in Brooklyn, film festivals in Miami and Guyana, and runs a video-on-demand platform, for Caribbean films.  Ms. Lucas earned her undergraduate degree at the University of the District of Columbia, her J.D. at Howard University School of Law, and her L.L.M. at Temple University School of Law.  She currently also teaches in the Chemistry Department at the Bronx Community College, and was selected to the New York Foundation for the Arts’ first Arts Business Incubator.

Richard Peña

Mr. Peña is Professor of Professional Practice in Film at the School of the Arts of Columbia University, and is affiliated with Columbia’s Heyman Institute for the Humanities and its Institute for Latin American Studies.  He was a Visiting Professor of Spanish at Princeton University from 2006 to 2009.  Mr. Peña served as Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012.  At the Film Society, he organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Gabriel Figueroa, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Chinese, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Japanese, Soviet and Argentine cinema. Mr. Peña is also currently the co-host of Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.  He is a graduate of Harvard College and the film program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pablo piccato

Mr. Piccato is Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of Columbia’s Institute of Latin American Studies.  He received his M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a 1990 graduate of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City.  He is on the Editorial Board of the Law and History Review.  Professor Piccato specializes in Mexican history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is the author of many books, including: City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Duke University Press, 2001), The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Duke University Press, 2010) and A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017).  Among Professor Piccato’s many scholarly articles is “Pistoleros, Ley Fuga, and Uncertainty in Public Debates about Murder in Twentieth-Century Mexico” in Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968, edited by Paul Gillingham and Benjamin Smith (Duke University Press, 2014).

JOHN E. ROGERS

Mr. Rogers is Of Counsel with the law firm Strasburger & Price LLP, and divides his time between the firm’s offices in Mexico City and New York.  Mr. Rogers established the firm’s New York office in 2007 and is currently in charge of its office in Mexico City, where he has resided for more than 25 years overall.  He is a former chair of the Committee on Inter-American Affairs of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and a former co-chair of the Mexican Law Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section on International Law.  He is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School.

ALEX STERN

Mr. Stern is a financial consultant working in New York and Mexico City, with over 20 years of consulting experience related to all aspects of the M&A lifecycle for corporations and financial sponsor firms across a wide range of industries. Currently Mr. Stern leads the Mexico City office of Duff & Phelps.  Mr. Stern also has extensive experience as corporate development director, having driven the growth of consulting and advisory businesses in this role for the last 10 years.    Mr. Stern has lived in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, and holds a bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and a M.B.A. degree from the University of Salford in Manchester, UK.

Barbara Weinstein

Ms. Weinstein is Professor of History and former chair of the History Department of New York University.  Her research has focused on postcolonial Latin America, particularly Brazil. Her courses and publications explore questions of labor, gender, race, and political economy in regions as diverse as the Amazon, with the world's largest rainforest, and the state of São Paulo, Latin America’s leading industrial center. Weinstein’s most recent book is "The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2015)". Ms. Weinstein earned her undergraduate degree at Princeton University and her Ph.D at Yale University. Before moving to NYU, she was on the faculty at Stony Brook University and the University of Maryland, and she has also taught as a Fulbright lecturer at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2010-11 she was a resident fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2007, she served as president of the American Historical Association.