Zoila Mendoza

Zoila Silvia del Rosario Mendoza Beoutis (born 1960) is a Peruvian-born anthropologist and documentary filmmaker based in the United States. She has written books on dance and folklore in the Peruvian city of Cusco and is a professor at the University of California, Davis Department of Native American Studies.

Biography Zoila Silvia del Rosario Mendoza Beoutis She was named after her mother and a close friend of the former, musician Yma Sumac.

Mendoza studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), where she got her BA in 1982 and Licenciatura in 1985, and the University of Chicago, where she got her MA in 1987 and PhD in 1993; all of these degrees were both in the field of anthropology. Her PhD dissertation is titled Shaping Society Through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Southern Peruvian Highlands. She was a 1988–1989 Fulbright Fellow. In the late-1980s, she started an archive of audiovisual content as part of her research, later housed at the PUCP's Instituto de Etnomusicología Andina. She later published three books on dance and folklore in the Peruvian city of Cusco: Al Son de la Danza: Identidad y Comparsas en el Cuzco (2001); Crear y Sentir lo Nuestro: Folklore Identidad Regional y Nacional en Cuzco, Siglo XX (2006); and Creating our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru (2008). She is also fluent in the Quechua language. She later went to two more pilgrimages in 2008 and 2010. and The Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i: The Walk Experience, inspired by her experiences with the Quyllurit'i festival.