Dr. Ana Cristina O. Lopes

Ana Cristina received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sao Paulo and her MA in Buddhist Studies from Columbia University. She studied Classical Tibetan as part of her PhD research, in postdocs at Columbia and Harvard universities, and at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute.          

Ana Cristina was faculty at University of Virginia and UNC-Greensboro. She also taught at RYI-Austria and Stanford University, where she is Visiting Fellow at the Center for South Asia. She is the author of Tibetan Buddhism in Diaspora (Routledge, 2015).          

I was born on International Translation Day. It was my grandma, a fervent Catholic with whom I shared a birthday, who informed me of this, adding that the date celebrated Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin. I always knew I wanted to learn languages. I started with French and English but fell in love with Tibetan as soon as I encountered it in my studies at Columbia. While I pursued my scholarly studies of the Tibetan diaspora in the field of Anthropology, another passion, I also developed my Tibetan language skills. Later I had a chance to deepen my knowledge of Tibetan at RYI in Nepal and in post-docs at major American universities. I eagerly followed then the formation of the 84000 project. I soon started to collaborate with Dharmachakra Translation Group, which led to where I am now: my dream-job. Translating the sūtras and in particular the Buddhāvataṃsakasūtra has opened new universes for me, and I cannot wait to find out where else it will lead me.

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