Lourdes Alvarez Silva

Department: Arts & Culture
Email: [email protected]

Biography:

Lourdes Alvarez Silva is the Assistant Director of Arts and Culture at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), overseeing the agency’s arts and culture portfolio. In this role, she is dedicated to fostering social equity, promoting community well-being, and expanding access to cultural resources. She is passionate about preserving cultural heritage and strengthening the creative sector workforce.

She brings more than seven years of experience in local government in Massachusetts, with ability in project management, cross-sector collaboration, and community engagement. She proactively integrates her background on journalism, fact-checking, and data visualization into her work. Before joining MAPC, she served as the City of Chelsea’s first Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy Manager. During her tenure in Chelsea, she was instrumental in the city’s COVID-19 response, leading communication and outreach efforts and managing emergency programs, including the Chelsea Eats program, the largest universal basic income pilot project in the United States.

Lourdes has contributed to pioneering efforts to advance cultural management in higher education across Latin America and the Caribbean. She worked on the communications team for the first Faculty of Culture, which established Uruguay’s first bachelor’s degree in Cultural Management, and was a researcher for University of Puerto Rico, Faculty of Humanities, Cultural Management Graduate Program, the first master’s degree program in Puerto Rico and one of the first in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Fluent in English and Spanish, Lourdes holds a master’s degree in Cultural Management from the University of Puerto Rico and a bachelor’s degree in film production from Universidad de la República in Uruguay.