Margarita Cuéllar Barona is the director of the Regional Center for the Promotion of Books in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cerlalc), an intergovernmental organization sponsored by UNESCO that works to create conditions for the development of societies of readers and writers.

For over seventeen years, she worked as a professor and researcher at the Icesi University in Cali, Colombia, where she directed the Gender Studies Program from 2018 to 2024 and led the Department of Art and Humanities from 2012 to 2023.

She co-created (2009), edited, and directed (2009 – 2024) the magazine of cultural agitation “papel de colgadura” and led the Seminar on Feminist Pedagogies and the Textile Seminar – El Costurero, a space where people study, read, sew, embroider, and weave.

She participated as the principal investigator in various projects exploring the relationship between textiles, sewing, pedagogy, and memory, focusing on participatory methods based on art and collaborative textile creation as a means of documentation.

Some of the pieces created in El Costurero have been featured in galleries such as Casa Hoffmann (Bogotá), the La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art (Cali), and the University Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC (Mexico City).

She is interested in researching feminist pedagogies, textile crafts, and literature written by women.

In 2021, she published her first novel, “Domestic Geography” (Tusquets).