MARTA MARTÍNEZ FERNÁNDEZ
Connecticut College, B.A., International Relations

As a student at Connecticut College, Marta focused on international relations and political science. Following her passion for traveling, she spent an entire year between Paris and London. Marta is from the Spanish city of Valencia, and she has also lived in Italy, France, the U.K, and the U.S. While in France, she interned for an organization working with refugees and access to higher education, which inspired her to spend her first year out of college in the French capital working for an NGO fighting for equal opportunity. Besides working for this organization, Marta spends a lot of her time with children as she is an English teacher and an au pair. Aside from travel, children, and education, Marta is passionate about gastronomy and cuisines around the world, as well as singing and exploring new cities and towns by walking. Last year she led Language Learning Spain.

DAVID DURÁN
University of Massachusetts Amherst, B.A., Communications, Film, French & Francophone Studies

Raised in Madrid in a bilingual (Spanish and English) household, David has always had a passion for travel, music, learning new languages, and experiencing the beauty of other cultures. In college, he majored in communications and film studies, minored in French and francophone studies, and studied abroad in Paris, where he attended l’Université Paris: La Sorbonne. While a UMass student, he tutored an ELL student at Amherst Middle School and substituted for a Spanish teacher, and in doing so, accidentally realized being a language teacher is his true vocation. He has since become a certified Spanish and French teacher, and for the past 10 years David has taught Spanish (and French for the past six years) through music, art, and culture, in several Massachusetts schools. Additionally, at his current school, Pioneer Valley Performing Arts, he teaches a course called Cultural Conversations in World Cinema, which represents 65 countries through film. Aside from being a musician, for many years David also studied the polyrhythmic traditional music of the peoples of southern Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In 2013, he traveled to Ghana to participate in an Adzogbo Symposium in a life-changing immersive Ewe drumming program at the Dagbe Cultural Institute & Arts Centre. In addition to Ghana, France and Spain, David has traveled to Costa Rica, Mexico, Switzerland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Iceland, and more.