OUR MISSION:
To support the educational and professional advancement of the Maya people and neighboring indigenous cultures in southern Mexico, Belize and Central America, and to sustain programs that foster study, preservation and understanding of those cultures.
 
DONATE BY MAIL OR PHONE:
If you prefer to donate by mail, please make check payable to Maya Educational Foundation and send to:
 
Maya Educational Foundation
P.O. Box 1483
Wellfleet, MA 02667, USA 
 
Or call us at:
 
Tel. (508) 349-1330
 
DonateNow
 
MEF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All contributions are U.S. tax-deductible.
 
MEF on
Home      Board members

Current MEF Board Members and staff
 
President  
received her MA degree in anthropology from The George Washington University and is professor emerita from Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. She has worked on issues of the historic destruction of self‑sufficient agriculture in the Guatemalan highland in order to produce Maya labor for the coastal plantations. She is the co‑editor of The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan Faces, New American Lives with James Loucky. A long‑time member, secretary, and supporter of the Guatemala Scholars Network.
 
Vice-President
is the founder of Mayan Hands, an organization that works with Maya weavers' cooperatives. She has a PhD in anthropology from the State University of New York in Albany. She is the author of With Our Heads Bowed: the Dynamics of Gender in a Maya Community.
 
 
Secretary to the Board
has a master’s degree in English and Spanish from Heidelberg University, Germany and has worked with MEF since its inception as staff and volunteer supporter of the organization. She is MEF’s secretary and assists the board in all matters. She visits and maintains close ties with the projects and does MEF development work.
 
 
holds her PhD in anthropology from SUNY Buffalo and is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Her research has been centered on Tsotsil Maya women in the area of San Pedro Chenalho in Chiapas, Mexico. She assisted them in the formation of a weaving cooperative and is the author of Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town. She also is the coeditor of Women of Chiapas: Making History in Times of Struggle and Hope and co-author with "Antonia" of the forthcoming book, The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico.
 
 

has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is professor of Anthropology at Marlboro College. She has been researching weaving in the central Guatemalan highlands for more than twenty-five years, and her research focuses on ways clothing non-verbally relates cultural meanings and provides insight into local understandings of issues such as ethnicity, gender, class, politics and national identity. She is the author of Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town, and co-author of Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Global and Local Context. 

 
 
is professor emeritus from Dartmouth Medical School, Senior Epidemiologist, Cancer Research and Biostatistics (CRAB) and Affiliate Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Together with his wife Jane, Bob has created and directed the very successful English Language Program for MEF. For five years now, he has gathered groups of volunteers from the US to travel to Guatemala to teach English to Mayan students for two weeks.
 
 
is associate professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire and has a licenciatura degree from the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala as well as a masters degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has worked extensively with children and mothers in Guatemala and the U.S. in child development projects in school and after school programs. He has been a board member since 2008.
 
 
studied photography at The School of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His works are housed in many private collections and photographic archives including Tulane University, and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) Photographic Archive, of which Mitchell was the founder. His work has been used to illustrate many articles and journals on development and anthropology, including the book Getting Ahead Collectively by Albert O. Hirschman. His forthcoming book The Portraits of Mitchell Denburg is currently in production. In 1998 together with his wife Elizabeth Habie, Mitchell founded the New Roots Foundation, dedicated to the rescue of young girls at risk and unique and endangered ecosystems in Guatemala.

 
Honorary Board Members
holds a doctorate in history from the University Wisconsin-Madison. He is the managing director of Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies and former editor of Mesoamérica. A co-founder of MEF, he has long supported educational projects in Guatemala. He also co-founded the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA), an internationally recognized social science research center in Antigua Guatemala, and is the author of a number of works, including Santiago de Guatemala 1541-1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience. 
 
 
an anthropologist, is Curator Emeritus of Mesoamerican ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. He has been part of the Tsotsil-Tseltal Maya writers' cooperative Sna Jtz'ibajom since its creation in 1983 in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. He is the author of numerous works, among others, "Tzotzil," The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures. 
 
 
has been working with the women's cooperative FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya) since its creation. FOMMA is a Tseltal-Tsotsil women writers and theater group in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Its plays focus on Mayan women's problems in society. It has become a resource center offering job skills training, literacy classes, childcare and more. Miriam is the author of "Mayan Women Playwrights," Belles Lettres. 
 
Maya Educational Foundation • P.O. Box 1483 • Wellfleet, MA 02667, USA
Tel. (508) 349-1330 • Fax (508) 349-0252 • mef@mayaedufound.org