Juan Castrillón is an ethnomusicologist, cultural anthropologist, and filmmaker. His research explores theories of listening, media archives, and contemporary healing arts in the daily life. His regional expertise is Turkey and the Northwest Amazon in Colombia. His research interests include relations between music pedagogy, theology and subjectification; history of sound recording, race and gender formation and critical theory; rituals, semiotics and modalities of inscription.

Castrillón’s academic and media-based work is a performative response to contemporary debates in the humanities about decoloniality, visual and sound cultures, and indigenous analytics of time and technology. His work has been published in academic journals, exhibited at film festivals, art galleries and academic conferences internationally, and distributed among local communities in indigenous languages.

He is currently the Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as board member of the Society for Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA), and he an active member of the Center for Research and Collaboration in the Indigenous Americas (CRACIA), the Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN), and an alumnus of the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA at Penn). He received his Ph.D. in Music Studies with a certificate in Experimental Ethnography from the University of Pennsylvania, and his B.A. in Anthropology from Universidad de Antioquia.

Apart from his academic career, he is a performer of Turkish Sufi Music, facilitator of a music therapy protocol, and pursues Arabic calligraphy and Ney reed-flute training under Turkish instructors.