People

The Director

Arielle AkinesDr. Arielle Akines first began learning Spanish in the third grade. Currently, she has over ten years of experience teaching and tutoring Spanish at the graduate, undergraduate, and elementary school levels. Her background includes working in university language centers, working as an expert linguist researcher for Fortune 500 companies, and as a reading specialist for bilingual elementary students. She has lived in Málaga, Spain and completed her doctoral research on Afro-Latinos in Bogotá, Colombia. She was selected as a 2016 Smithsonian Museum Latino Center Fellow, to research language taxonomies and entity identification.