Michelle Lezana

Michelle Lezana is a Chilean linguist and research strategist whose work examines how scientific, cultural, and ancestral knowledge is produced, translated, and how it travels across institutions, communities, and systems of access. Raised in Patagonia and German-educated, she worked and completed her postgraduate studies at Freie Universität Berlin, before working in research at Universidade do Porto and furthering her studies in International University Management at Universidad de Alcalá, Spain.

When Universidad de Aysén was born out of a historic community demand for higher education, she left her European trajectory to return home. As part of the founding team, she helped establish the university's research directorate with a clear purpose: to challenge the centralization of knowledge production, building institutional capacity for peripheral territories to directly shape global climate science.

Moving between the global and the remote, she now works within European research and open-data ecosystems, and is a co-founder and director of the Institute for Wild Futures, a public-interest think tank focused on ecology, technology, governance, and territorial knowledge.

Her work asks a recurring question: what knowledge is considered legitimate, who gets access to it, and in what form does it need to arrive for it to matter?