Perry is currently a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His research tacks between Ngäbe, Buglé, and campesino communities indigenous to western Panama and the UN climate process, following the fraught interfaces between local decolonial practices of recuperating lands expropriated and left in ruins by cattle ranchers on one hand, and emerging policy frameworks related to carbon markets on the other. More broadly, this work seeks to understand climate change both in the register of everyday life and as a conceptual problem troubling conceptions of nature and the social, while centering Ngäbe and campesino practices of recuperation as a form of embodied and emplaced knowledge affording vital insights for life with climate change.
Before coming to Johns Hopkins, Perry completed an MA in anthropology at McGill University in 2018, and a BA in the Program in the Environment (honors) along with a BMus in oboe performance (honors) at the University of Michigan in 2015. He first came to Panama in 2016 at the invitation of Ngäbe and Buglé traditional authorities to help document the ongoing vitality of swidden agroecology as well as the challenges posed to these practices by the intersecting pressures of the climate crisis and extractive capital. His MA thesis, completed alongside this collaborative project with funding from the Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services, and Sustainability NSERC-Create Grant, explored how smallholder agriculture is folded into anti-extractivist politics, how the prospect of an open-pit copper mine brings smallholder farming into relief as a means of living more conducive to human and multispecies flourishing.
Perry is also a musician, performer, and multimedia improviser. He is a co-founder of the experimental performance collective suburban piano quartet, established in Ann Arbor in 2012, and of tree work, an improvisatory, process-oriented interarts trio formed in Chicago in 2018.