Daniela Morales Fredes is a doctoral student from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She holds a BA in Law from the University of Chile and a Minor in Philosophy and Aesthetics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has more than ten years of experience working in Chilean public institutions such as the National Monuments Council and the Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage and as a private practitioner providing support to grassroots organizations and local communities. She has also participated in and led several research projects and consultancy on cultural heritage, human rights, and environmental planning, applying participatory design and planning methods. Since 2019 she has been part of Monumentos Incomodos, an interdisciplinary research collective focused on identifying and surveying public monuments to conduct a critical and decolonial analysis of the role of urban memory in strengthening democracy and human rights recognition. Her main areas of interest are environmental and historic preservation and cultural heritage as a resource for community development. Currently, she is an Inaugural Mellon Foundation Interseminars Graduate Fellow from the Humanities Research Institute at UIUC.
Email: dm38@illinois.edu
