Elena Castellanos

Elena Castellanos is a program assistant in the Office of the President, where she supports the Monuments Project Initiative.

Prior to joining Mellon, Elena served as a graduate research fellow archiving spaces and traditions of memorialization and stories of loss and resilience in post-climate-disaster-impacted communities across Indonesia, Japan, and Mexico with the support from the Harvard Asia Center and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Elena was also a Henry Luce Scholar placed in Seoul, South Korea, where she worked for the University of Seoul’s Community and Urban Design Lab.

She holds a BA with honors in philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) and public policy from Claremont McKenna College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow, and an MA in urban planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.