Vanessa K. Harper has lived and worked in Cuba as a researcher, producer, documentarian, and facilitator of collaborative agreements between U.S. and Cuban institutions since 2005. She runs Travel Cuba With Us, a tour company that specializes in ethical traveler tours and yoga retreats that directly support the Cuban people. Vanessa is also the founder of Support the Cuban People, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that prioritizes food and medicine aid to individuals in need, apolitical academic engagement, and micro-grant support for independent artists and entrepreneurs.
Vanessa joined OHMA in 2021 in order to incorporate the oral history practice into her eighteen-year, multimedia body of work that documents the lives of subsistence farmers in the western mountains of rural Cuba, and their stories, over time, using photography, video, genealogies, and archival material. While at OHMA she brought all of this work together in a project titled Honoring El Moro: A Cuban Collective Memory. In addition to this project, she focuses her social documentary and oral history work in and around Havana on women over the age of eighty, artists, entrepreneurs, and other humanitarian and special interest projects.
She is former Executive Producer at TigerLily, a full-service creative production and post-production company rooted in the film industry, and previously served three years as Cuba Scholar in Residence at Jacksonville University, where she co-created The Cuba Project and facilitated a collaborative agreement between the university and the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation in Havana, Cuba. Prior to that she worked as Producer & Strategist at Brunet Garcia Advertising and Director of Education and Community Outreach at the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville.
Vanessa currently splits her time between northeast Florida and Havana, Cuba. A proud native of North Carolina, she holds a BS in Environmental Studies (Ecology & Field Biology track) from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and an MS in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida, with a concentration in Food and Resource Economics and Cuban Studies. She graduated from OHMA in May 2023 following completion of her thesis: Trust, Love, and Collaboration: On Doing Oral History in Cuba.