Perry is a socio-cultural anthropologist working at the intersections of Indigeneity, climate politics, and millenarian religiosity in Latin America and the Caribbean, and currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. His doctoral dissertation and book project, Burnt Earth and the Smell of Rain: Prophecy and Climate Change in Indigenous Panama, brings together scholarship of climate experience and climate governance by moving between Ngäbe communities Indigenous to Panama and the UN climate process. More broadly, he engages ethnographic, archival, and sound arts methodologies to trace how temporalities of prophecy sit alongside anthropogenic climate change, capitalist social formations, and colonial legacies.
Since 2016, he has worked in close partnership with grassroots Ngäbe environmental activists, documenting the fraught interfaces between local 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. This work, which has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundations, the Sidney Mintz Fellowship (JHU), and the Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services, and Sustainability NSERC-Create Grant (McGill), centers Ngäbe and campesino practices of recuperation as forms 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 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.