People
Twenty years of shared practice. Two MA degrees. One question that has organized it all.
Shared Practice
Two paths, one conviction.
Patricia Vlieg and Vilma Esquivel built Bridges for Dialogue together — through concerts, residencies, research and a relationship with Japan that began long before either of them had words for what they were doing.
Co-founder
Patricia Vlieg
Singer, pianist, composer and arranger · Intercultural artist specializing in cross-cultural communication through music
She grew up in Panama City in a multicultural household where Latin American, Caribbean, folkloric and classical music coexisted.
As a young girl of nine, she became friends with a Japanese family — three sisters whose father was posted in Panama as a technical advisor. Out of a wish to be close to them, she began learning Japanese through weekly phone calls. That childhood friendship opened a door into Panama’s Japanese community that she kept walking through for years, sustained by ongoing ties with Japanese residents and institutions both in Panama and abroad. That thread — a language learned for the sake of friendship, a curiosity that never let go — became the foundation for her later, more formal involvement with Panama-Japan relations through music. In 2011, it carried her to Japan for the first time, as a guest artist invited by the Embassy of Panama in Japan.
She graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston — where she received the Quincy Jones Award, the Solo and Ensemble Award and the Professional Achievement Award — and pursued advanced vocal studies at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her discography includes Tus Promesas (2001), Origen (2005), A una Cantora (2011) — a tribute to Mercedes Sosa that brought her international recognition — and Cabanga (2015), first released in Panama, with a Japanese edition following in 2019.
Beyond the stage, Patricia has taught at the Berklee Latino Program, the Music Business Diploma Program at Ciudad del Saber, the IESA School of Management, and the University of Panama. She has performed across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia alongside artists including Paquito D’Rivera, Lila Downs, Popi Spatocco, Cheo Hurtado, Aquiles Báez, and Japanese percussionist Tomohiro Yahiro.
She is the creator and host of Puentes y Diálogos — five seasons of weekly conversations and artistic collaborations promoting intercultural understanding through music. That first trip opened a sustained practice of cultural bridge-building between Panama and Japan: the Cabanga Japan Tour 2019 covered six cities (Tokyo, Kobe, Imabari, Gifu, Nagoya, Hamamatsu); the 2024 concerts at Min-On honored 120 years of Panama–Japan diplomatic relations and were recognized by the Japanese Embassy in Panama.
She has been invited to speak at important events in Panama that promote interculturality between nations, and performed at the opening of the 8th Our Ocean Conference in Panama. In 2026, she joined Peace Boat Voyage 123 as guest artist and lecturer.
She completed her MA in International Relations and Peace Studies at Soka University, Tokyo, in March 2026. Her thesis — Sounds of Identity: Panamanian Folk Songs as Decolonial Narratives of Cultural Memory and Collective Reimagining — demonstrates how folk songs function simultaneously as instruments of diagnosis and healing, and as pathways toward what she calls re-existence: the creative reconstruction of alternative ways of being.
Co-founder
Vilma Esquivel
Music therapist, cultural producer and strategist · Specialist in knowledge management and intercultural mediation
Vilma Esquivel came to Japan through Patricia’s music — and stayed long enough to write her graduate research there.
She first traveled to Japan in 2011 as Patricia’s manager. That first trip planted something that took years to fully surface: she returned in 2019 — to Soka University, where the institution’s philosophy of intercultural understanding through music moved her enough to apply to its graduate program. She applied alongside Patricia that year. Both enrolled in 2024 and graduated in March 2026.
Her path to that research began in Washington DC, where she trained as a music therapist at The Catholic University of America, and continued in Panama across two parallel tracks that she has always carried together: artistic production and institutional leadership.
On the institutional side, Vilma served as Knowledge Management Manager at UNICEF, working on digital tools to streamline information and foster collaboration across teams, agencies and partners. She worked with UNDP on complex project management, and as a consultant for Cable & Wireless on the development of digital TV platforms, negotiating transmission and advertising agreements. As Marketing Manager at Cable Onda, she led digital initiatives to strengthen brand visibility and engagement. That decade of corporate and institutional experience gave her the capacity to hold the full arc of complex projects — from vision to execution — that now organizes everything Bridges produces.
On the artistic side, she founded InHarmony Academy and became the founding president of APAMU — the Asociación Panameña de Musicoterapia — playing a central role in advancing the field of music therapy in Panama and contributing to the implementation of relevant legislation. She is certified in HealthRHYTHMS®, Kindermusik® and the Belbin® Methodology. Since 2011, she has served as Executive Producer of Cultural Projects and representative of Patricia Vlieg, producing every major program that Bridges has built.
Her MA research at Soka University examined mediation training across its dominant models, where cognitive frameworks and procedural techniques often leave the body, emotion and time underdeveloped as sites of learning. From that research she developed ARTI — the four capacities that define what she calls the Musically-Formed Mediator.