Rocío Vera Santos has a Ph.D. in Sociology. From 2015 to 2018 she worked as a lecturer and research fellow for the Sociology Department of the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Free University in Berlin, where she was awarded summa cum laude for the defense of her doctoral thesis. For her work “Dinámicas de la Negritud y Africanidad, Construcciones de la Afrodescendencia en Ecuador she received the Isabel Tobar Guarderas Prize for best work at a national level in social sciences, granted by the Municipal Government of Quito, Ecuador. Her new publication “Entre el Atlántico y el Pacífico Negro, Afrodescendencia y Regímenes de Desigualdad en Sudamérica” is an analysis of social inequalities in Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil from Colonial period until multiculturalism.

Since 2017, she has been lecturing at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Her teaching career began in 2010 when she took on a lecturing position at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. In 2010 Vera Santos produced the project Black Box Afro-Ecuador, a cultural installation in the center of Berlin which narrated the history of the descendants of Africans in Ecuador, of slavery, colonialism, and the effects of it which last until today, as well as the cultural and political positioning of the Afro-Ecuadorian people.