Our Story
Cecilia Ballí and Michael Powell met in Houston when they began their Ph.D. programs in anthropology. They were drawn to Rice University’s small but prestigious department that was focused on developing new approaches to ethnographic research and writing. Under the mentorship of renowned anthropologists George Marcus and James Faubion, Michael conducted fieldwork on transparency policy in Poland, and Cecilia on the serialized sexual killing of women along the U.S.-Mexico border.
After graduating, Michael worked as a research, strategy and design consultant in Los Angeles, and Cecilia wrote longform journalism while teaching as an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Nearly twenty years since meeting, they reunited to develop Culture Concepts in late 2018.
Cecilia Ballí, Ph.D.
Founder and Principal
Cecilia Ballí is a journalist, cultural anthropologist and consultant with more than twenty-five years of professional experience. She was a writer-at-large at Texas Monthly for twenty years, and has written stories and columns for highly regarded national media outlets including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review. She began her journalism career as a newspaper reporter at the San Antonio Express-News. She has published longform magazine stories on many subjects, including U.S.-Mexico border history and culture, immigration and border enforcement, and the Mexican military’s use of forced disappearance and torture in its war on drugs. She has won various prestigious journalism and writing awards and her stories have been reprinted in multiple anthologies including Best American Crime Writing. She is currently writing about a narrative nonfiction book about competitive high school mariachis in the Texas Rio Grande Valley for Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.
For six years, Cecilia was an Assistant Professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Anthropology, where she was also affiliated with the institutes for Mexican American Studies, Latin American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Human Rights. She left academia to focus on writing and consulting, but has since served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Houston and as a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at San Antonio. As an anthropologist, she has conducted extensive ethnographic research on Tejano music and identity, the sexual murders of Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez, the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and Latino voting and civic engagement.
Cecilia enjoys working with nonprofits, foundations, educational institutions, and other public and private clients to improve community and stakeholder engagement; storytelling, strategic messaging and narrative change; and to uncover deeper insights into underrepresented communities. She is passionate about inclusion, equity and belonging and has dedicated her writing life to challenging mainstream media narratives in order to produce richer, fuller stories about our communities.
The daughter of former migrant farmworkers whose families have deep roots in the Texas/Tamaulipas border region, Cecilia grew up in Brownsville and began writing for The Brownsville Herald as a high school senior. She received a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and Spanish from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Rice University. She has lived in six different Texas cities, and now resides in San Antonio.
Michael Powell, Ph.D.
Principal
Michael Powell is a professional anthropologist and consultant. He has worked for fifteen years as a consultant using a research-driven approach to understanding problems for clients, investigating creative solutions, and imagining strategic future pathways. His work has brought him to many types of challenges. He has designed grocery stores throughout North America, for brands like Whole Foods, Freson Bros and United Supermarkets. He has helped educational institutions, like Pepperdine University, rediscover their core brand identity. He has consulted with Harley-Davidson on creating more social dealership experiences. He has also worked with financial service firms on reinventing banking environments. And that’s just a handful of projects, with many others in consumer packaged goods, housing developers, urban districts, workplace, and nonprofits.
After receiving his PhD in Anthropology from Rice University, Michael began working with a number of consultant groups, including Redsquared Consulting, Water Cooler Logic, and Pacific Ethnography. For thirteen years, he worked in-house for design firms, with the bulk of that time at Shook Kelley, in Los Angeles. There he led research efforts to design innovative retail experiences. He watched people shop, talked to consumers, learned organizational cultures, and studied evolving consumer cultures, a story captured well by journalist Joe Fassler in an award-winning essay about the firm. More recently, he’s worked with Wolcott Architecture Interiors producing distinctive workplaces.
Michael is a connector-of-dots and behind-the-scenes supporter, who enjoys diving deep into unwieldy problems. He’s also results-driven, and always seeking solutions that improve lives. A common thread across his favorite projects are the institutions of everyday life—from grocery stores and office buildings—to the subjects of casual conversation and emotional challenges of busy families. These daily habits shape us in profound and easily taken-for-granted ways.
Born and raised in Chicago, Michael has moved around a lot. He currently lives in Houston with his wife Natilee Harren, professor of art history at the University of Houston, and their two rambunctious sons.
