I was born in Santiago de Chile and I am a librarian by profession. Poetry has always interested me and in the mid-90s I participated in the workshops given by the payador Pedro Yáñez, together with the troubadour Eduardo Peralta. There I learned about the décima strophe and improvisation, and I became aware of peasant songs and the transposed guitar usage as a cultural and family heritage. I studied at Universidad de Playa Ancha (Valparaíso), where I resumed my interest in the Canto a lo Poeta tradition, researching, in my undergraduate thesis, about intangible heritage and how it is registered in institutions linked to information management. In 2021, with my sister, cantora and poet-improviser, Caro López, I worked on the publication of the book ‘Luis Ortúzar, el Chincol. Vida y versos de un cantor a lo poeta’ published by Cuarto Propio. It has been over a decade now since I settled in Villa Alemana, Valparaíso.

I was a street cantora for 15 years, a job that allowed me to study a Teaching degree at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación in Santiago, a career from which I graduated in 2010. Later, I studied a Master's in Latin American Musicology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, from which I graduated in 2021, with the hopes of developing research, creation and dissemination of music, meaningful lutherie and organology, to share it with my community. Currently, in addition to my work in popular music-poetry, I cultivate pottery, creating and recreating sound utensils such as flutes, vessels, bottles, trumpets, drums and rattles... Since 2014 I have participated as director of the cultural space Casa-Taller MLO, a place where creative projects that allow us to resonate with joy and defiance are conceived and materialised.

Cantora a lo poeta, payadora, cueca cantora and music teacher. She plays transposed guitar to accompany the singing learned from peasant cantoras, and mixes it with her urban music skills. She has been improvising in décimas for eight years, and as a payadora she has been present in important summits throughout Chile, and also Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Cuba and Mexico. She received Premio Pulsar 2019 as Best Roots Artist with her album ‘Una mujer como uste’; she has won Premio Margot Loyola three times, and twice the Concurso Luis Advis. With other women poets, she is the author of ‘La Décima Feminista’; and with her sister Lorena she authored of the book ‘Luis Ortuzar el Chincol. Vida y versos de un cantor a lo poeta’.

Nayla Beltrán has a degree in Argentine Music from Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She dedicates herself to the interpretation, composition and research of the music of the pampas plain and to the writing of creole poetry from a contemporary perspective. In 2021 she published a record-book ‘Décimas Feminas-versos criollos en clave feminista’ by the publishing house La mariposa y la iguana.

Araceli Argüello was born on February 20, 1995 in Pozo del Molle, Córdoba, Argentina. She comes from a traditionalist family. From an early age she cultivated the art of the payador. At the age of 18, she was initiated as a payadora by Marta Suint and José Silvio Curbelo. The paths of her art took her through different geographies of Argentina, Uruguay, Spain and France. Enabled by her CONICET research scholarship she has a degree in Language and Literature from Universidad Nacional de Villa María, and is currently a PhD student at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, as well as a payadora, decimista and independent researcher.

Postdoctoral research fellow at the department of Languages Literatures and Cultures, King's College London. An anthropologist at heart, I am trained in Ethnomusicology (PhD), Cultural Studies (MA), Sociology (BSc) and Fine Arts (BFA). My research has focused extensively on the social history of women's traditional music and popular poetry in Chile and Latin America, having worked in both educational and government institutions. Having vast experience in ethnographic research, my current work explores the methods of collaborative ethnography and arts-based research practice. One of my foremost passions is Latin American music-poetry and the décima strophe.