Denise Zubizarreta
MALCM, CAEGP

bio

Denise Zubizarreta is a Cultural Operations Strategist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of media, technology, identity, and justice. She is currently a PhD student in Applied Social Justice at Dominican University, building on an MA in Arts Leadership & Cultural Management (Colorado State University) and a BFA in Fine Art (Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design).

She is the creator of both the Colonial Stockholm Syndrome (CSS) framework and the broader Colonial Psychological Complex (CPC), which anchor her forthcoming book on how colonialism shapes identity, emotional life, loyalty, and political imagination across Puerto Rican, Cuban, and wider diasporic communities. Her research investigates how disinformation, psychological conditioning, and structural inequity create a cycle of emotional capture—one that influences media consumption, institutional trust, migration decisions, and the preservation or erasure of cultural memory.

Denise serves as Director of Development & Communications at the New Mexico Local News Fund, where she advances sustainable local journalism ecosystems, oversees statewide initiatives like the News Matching Campaign and the New Mexico News Map, and supports newsroom capacity across the region. She is also the Director of Engagement & Development at Latina Media Co., a Rotten Tomatoes–approved publication that amplifies Latinx voices in arts criticism, entertainment journalism, and cultural commentary. Her work increasingly bridges arts, media, and emerging technology, including AI and cybersecurity.

Denise brings startup methodology, narrative strategy, and cross-sector communications experience to conversations about the socio-economic impact of AI. She actively works to break down silos between technologists, nonprofits, journalists, and creatives—ensuring that the communities most affected by technological disruption are not left out of the conversation or the solutions. As a writer, she publishes cultural criticism, op-eds, and essays across multiple outlets, blending critical autoethnography with media analysis and decolonial scholarship.

As an artist of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, she creates mixed-media work that interrogates ancestry, memory, trauma, and the psychological afterlives of colonialism. Across all her roles, Denise is committed to building equitable creative futures, strengthening community-centered media, and expanding the frameworks we use to understand power in the age of AI, information warfare, and global cultural change.