Ivonne Herrera-Pineda is a social anthropologist. Her research focuses on social movements, urbanism, citizen participation, urban and rural communities and the history of architecture in Portugal and Spain. Her specific research interests are socio-economic inequalities, sociability, collective memory and the built environment. Her education is interdisciplinary: she has a degree in Philosophy (2012), a Master's in Social Anthropology (2013) and a PhD in Human Sciences (2021), all from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

The specific area of her PhD was social and cultural anthropology, specifically urban and economic anthropology. Her doctoral research focused on urban communities, specifically on various mutual aid networks developed in a Madrid neighbourhood called Tetuán. This research looked at the role of these collective processes in the construction of the contemporary city, emphasising their capacity for resilience and social creativity. During her PhD, she enjoyed a research stay in Portugal, at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra. This academic period contributed decisively to consolidating her understanding of the possibilities of ethnography and her interests in urban studies, particularly in the social production of built space.

Between 2022 and 2026, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon within the ERC project "ReARQ.IB - Built Environment Knowledge for Resilient, Sustainable Communities: Understanding Everyday Modern Architecture and Urban Design in the Iberian Peninsula (1939–1985)" (European Research Council Starting Grant, GA949686). Within this project, Ivonne conducted participatory processes and research on collective memories associated with twentieth-century collective-use facilities in peripheral areas of the Iberian Peninsula. Her work approaches citizen participation as an integral part of the research process and as a form of public history and anthropology, articulating an interdisciplinary perspective that combines ethnography and built environment studies to analyse infrastructures as socially and historically produced configurations. She currently co-coordinates, with Catarina Ruivo, a project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation on the memories of dam construction during the Estado Novo dictatorship (2026–2029).