Winner of the 2025 Henry Myers Lecture
Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Vilaça has carried out ethnographic research among the Wari’ people in Southwestern Amazonia for over three decades and has published extensively in multiple languages on Indigenous agency, embodiment, kinship, cannibalism, conversion to Christianity, and ecologies of knowledges.
She is the author of multiple books, including Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia, and Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia, has co-authored Science in the Forest, Science in the Past. Paletó and Me: Memories of My Indigenous Father, which won the Casa de las Americas nonfiction award, the most important Latin American book prize.
Her powerful essay, Mourning Kin After the End of Cannibalism, examines mortuary cannibalism and other rituals of grieving and has appeared in Sapiens.