Guiomar Alonso is an anthropologist with 30 years of international experience in culture, education, and sustainable development. She has led multidisciplinary teams and designed innovative strategies in technical cooperation, institutional strengthening, and public policy advisory across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her work has been instrumental in promoting culture as a driver of development, consolidating approaches that integrate tangible and intangible heritage, traditional knowledge, and biocultural diversity into models of sustainability and resilience. Throughout her career, she has championed the systematisation, recognition, and protection of local and Indigenous knowledge, as well as intangible heritage. She has explored new methods of knowledge transmission in educational settings and fostered dialogue between empirical and modern science to co-create sustainable and resilient development models. Alonso has also spearheaded pioneering initiatives to assign quantitative values to intangible aspects of culture, such as the Culture for Development Indicators (CDIS)—a tool that has enabled measurement of culture’s contribution to development in over 35 countries. Since 1994, she has held various roles within UNESCO’s Culture Sector, including her tenure as Regional Culture Advisor at the UNESCO Office for West Africa/Sahel (2012–2022), where she led large-scale heritage protection projects and socio- economic development initiatives for local communities. Since 2022, as Head of the UNESCO Office in Peru, she has led efforts to bridge educational gaps in Amazonian regions, safeguard cultural and natural heritage, and revitalise local and Indigenous knowledge through innovative strategies for biodiversity management and preservation.