Ivan Guzman is a second generation Latino, born and raised on the Eastside of Joliet, Illinois. The second oldest and first to be born in the US, Ivan would follow the example of his older brother, who was the first to attend and graduate from college. He moved to Chicago right after high school and received a Bachelors in Teaching of History from UIC, and later a Masters in Museum & Exhibition Studies.

Ivan is an educator and curator. With the combined background of secondary education and museum studies, Ivan has been able to work in both formal and informal education spaces. His curatorial and exhibition design work on the Packingtown Museum, located inside The Plant in the Back of the Yards neighborhood,  has allowed him to use his education background to inform the ways in which specific communities engage with or don’t engage with exhibitions and museums. This experience was further developed during his time at the Chicago History Museum working on diversifying the museum’s youth and school programs and advocating, along with fellow Raices colleagues, for bilingual accessibility. 

Additionally, Ivan has worked with various organizations in increasing language accessibility for exhibitions and programs, including the Chicago Cultural Alliance, the Children's Museum of Art and Social Justice, Packingtown Museum, and the Chicago History Museum. Currently, Ivan is a Latin American History and Civics teacher at Benito Juarez Community Academy, as well as an adjunct lecturer in the humanities department at Malcolm X College, teaching the Humanities 209 class, Latinx in Chicago.

Ivan is a founding storyteller of Raices Chicago Story Coalition. As a child of Mexican immigrants, he understands the importance of documenting and sharing the stories of marginalized groups as a form of resistance and uses these experiences to inform his educational philosophy and to ground his work.