judy blankenship

I am the author of two books on Cañar, an indigenous town at 10,000 feet in the southern Andes of Ecuador: Cañar: A Year in the Highland of Ecuador (2005, University of Texas Press), and Our House in the Clouds: Building a SEcond Life in the Andes of Ecuador (forthcoming 2013). An award-winning photographer, writer and editor who lived many years in Canada and Latin American before settling in Portland, Oregon in the nineties, my husband and I now divide our time between Portland and Cañar.

My photographs are in the collections of the national museums of Costa Rica and Ecuador, and the exhibition, The Cañari of Southern Ecuador, has traveled to museums, universities and cultural venues across the U.S., Canada and in Ecuador. I have done several projects with the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, a partner in my 2004 Fulbright project.

I'm presently creating a Cultural Archive of Cañar (Archivo Cultural de Cañar) of discovered, vintage glass-plate photos from the 1940s-50s by the town photographer, along with contemporary images of indigenous festivals and daily life, videos and documents.