Born and raised in Quito, Ecuador, Juan Suárez Ontaneda's upbringing largely informed his research curiosities at the intersection of culture, political systems, and ideologies. Specifically, his research has analyzed how Latin American states produce discourses about race and how people respond to those discourses individually and collectively. How we think about culture informs how we think about citizenship and nation.

His current book manuscript Palimpsests of Blackness in Latin America: The Performative Lives of Nascimento, Zapata Olivella, and Santa Cruz examines how Afro-Latin American artists from Brazil, Colombia, and Peru used staged representations (writings, theater, sound recordings, choreographies, film) to challenge racism and discrimination in their respective countries from 1940-2000. By analyzing their staged representations, we see how these artists used their bodies to communicate messages of racial activism and, by doing so, how they created a vocabulary to protest racial injustices beyond the legal framework of the state.

In his second project, Juan Suárez Ontaneda examines the connection between sound systems, visual art, and the racialization of sound regulations in Caribbean Colombia and Northeastern Brazil. His research has been published in Modern Languages Notes, Alambique, Perspectivas Afro, and in different edited volumes.