Juliana Barnet is a social justice activist, writer, anti-colonial anthropologist, musician, and educator. For decades she was also also an organizer and translator for labor unions and worker organizations in Mexico and the US, as well as providing bilingual support for Latin American immigrants in educational, political and healthcare settings. She has long been a participant-observer of activist culture, focusing in on the experience of being an activist—the risks, tensions and dangers, as well as the joys, of daily life in the belly of the Beast activists are struggling to transform.
Juliana has been part of movements for a just society all her life, from the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements as a child and teen, to social movements in Mexico, where she lived for nearly two decades, and working for justice, peace and inclusion at many levels and with many groups and movements in the DC metropolitan area where she now lives, and elsewhere in the U.S and Latin America.
Her work includes making movement music with other social justice oriented musicians in Mexico and the US; also artistic, literary and activist explorations with young people–including her own daughter, Rainwood House Sings co-author and illustrator Sophie Barnet-Higgins, and a number of collective creative writing programs with neighborhood children and youth.