A trino is a birdsong, sound before words. From listening, we take flight.
- Strategic consulting
- Cultural production
- Training, workshops & collective processes
- Residencies & exchanges
- Conscious cultural travel
About the Lab
Trino Cultural Lab is a cultural lab with music as its common thread. We co-create with artists, communities, organizations, and businesses so that art becomes part of how we respond to the challenges we share.
Through a regenerative, non-extractive approach, we offer cultural consulting, festivals, activations, and artist development, at the intersection of other art forms, health, and social and ecological justice. Artists help shape each project from the start.
We work from Massachusetts and Costa Rica, in dialogue with other territories of Abya Yala.
What we do
Strategic consulting
Support for artists, organizations, and businesses:
- Artist development, from vision and narrative to career strategy
- Integrating arts and culture into organizations and businesses
- Cultural project design and management
- Decolonial and anti-patriarchal practices, and a regenerative, non-extractive cultural economy
Cultural production
Festivals, concerts, activations, and cultural series, alongside cultural organizations, businesses, universities, and public institutions.
Training, workshops & collective processes
Participatory workshops, mentorship, and training programs on cultural management, production, fundraising, and art as a tool for healing and collective liberation. For artists, organizations, and communities, in English and Spanish, in person or online.
Residencies & exchanges
Transdisciplinary residencies in Costa Rica that bring Costa Rican and international artists together to create: recordings, performances, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Conscious cultural travel
Experiences in Costa Rica that bring together art, nature, and community in a reciprocal way.
How we work
We understand culture as a living, communal, and diverse process. That's why how things are done matters as much as the result.
Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality
Life isn't divided into disciplines or isolated realities. Neither are our practices: we bring together art forms, knowledge, and fields, and we pay attention to how identities and inequalities intertwine.
Equity and decolonization
We center communities affected by racism, patriarchy, precarity, and other forms of exclusion and oppression. We work to decolonize and depatriarchalize both culture and the way business is done.
Artists help design
They take part from the very start of each project, not only in carrying it out.
Non-extractive cultural economy
Fair conditions for artists, cultural workers, and communities.
We practice what we say
These principles shape how we hire, pay, negotiate, and build budgets.
Lived experience
More than ten years of cultural management in four countries. We know from the inside the realities we work for.
Radical imagination
We test, adjust, and learn along the way, like a lab. And we do it with joy, because pleasure is also a form of transformation and liberation.
Ecological justice
There is no social justice without ecological justice, and our art is a tool for both. We are part of the ecosystems we inhabit, not their owners; therefore, we deeply care for the materials, processes, and community relationships in every project we create.
Projects and collaborations
Education
- Master’s Degree in Music Business Management – Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), 2026
- Bachelor of Arts in Arts Management – Universidad de Guadalajara, 2021
- Voice Performance – Berklee College of Music, 2016
Behind the trino
María Amalia Quesada · Founder and director
I am a Costa Rican vocalist, cultural manager, and program strategist based in Boston. My work lives at the intersection of art, equity, and community building. As a migrant woman navigating endometriosis, I approach creativity and cultural practice as spaces for healing, awareness, and liberation.
My artistic work centers on the raw and intuitive voice, connecting sound, body, and memory to create presence-based experimental work. I use the voice to reclaim agency, challenge perfectionism, and undo the patriarchal expectations placed on women and femmes in artistic and cultural spaces.
For more than a decade, I have led and collaborated on cultural programs and festivals across Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. I have co-founded organizations, directed international festivals, designed arts education initiatives, and developed community-rooted programs grounded in collaboration, equity, and cultural justice.
In Boston, I have supported artists as a consultant through the Arts Action Consortium and served on the grant review committee of the City of Boston's Boston Cultural Council. In 2023, the City of Boston recognized my work promoting Costa Rican culture and youth engagement through the arts.
At the core of my work is a commitment to dismantling patriarchal systems, advancing cultural and ecological justice, and creating spaces where women, migrants, and historically marginalized communities can express themselves, heal, and thrive. Trino Cultural Lab is where all of this comes together.
Why “Trino”?
In Spanish, a trino is a birdsong: sound before words, a way of responding to our surroundings and building community. In Latin, trinus means threefold: a third way that doesn’t force us to choose between two opposites. Our logo, created by artist Pablo Vargas Unfried, is an oropendola, a tropical songbird, singing as its sound vibrates outward.
From listening, we take flight.
Let's talk
Tell us what you have in mind, and let's see how we can work together.