About Valerie

Valerie Michelle Wilhite Ramírez is the founder and maker behind
Montealegre Atelier — a jewelry practice rooted in Colombian materials,
ancient technique, and a scholar's understanding of the pre-modern
world.

She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, with research centered on
the literature of medieval Romance-speaking cultures: the troubadours,
their texts, and the exchanges of language and ideas that moved across
the medieval Mediterranean. That work shaped not only how she reads
history, but how she sees form, material, and meaning.

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In her words

I spent years living inside the medieval Mediterranean — in Paris,
Toulouse, Barcelona, Girona, Béziers, and Besalú. My scholarship was
about language and literary theory, the troubadours and the exchanges of
ideas that moved across medieval Mediterranean cultures. But what those
years afforded me was immersion in a pre-modern Mediterranean: in stone, in light, in cities shaped by endurance, in an aesthetic that carved meaning into everything it touched.

That sensibility did not stay in the library; it came with me.

Return to Heritage

Valerie's life changed drastically after hurricanes interrupted her professorship at The University of the Virgin Islands on St. Croix in fall 2017. She went to Colombia and decided to train as a jeweler in the Andes — the place she considers the heart of the earth. There she encountered the tradition of filigrana momposina, a centuries-old Colombian filigree practice of extraordinary delicacy and precision. She also works in fabrication, sand casting, and lost-wax casting: methods with long histories reaching back into the ancient Mediterranean.

The pre-Columbian, the ancient, the medieval — these are not references. They are a way of seeing. Relationships with the earth, the region the miners that produce the materials is not done for ethics; it is the relationships that make ethics a value.

Our Stance

Every material choice at Montealegre Atelier is guided by the same principle: respect for source.
Approximately 70% of the silver and gold
used is recycled; the remainder comes from Responsible Jewellery Council-certified suppliers. The emeralds are purchased directly from a Colombian miner known personally to Valerie. Additional stones — bolivianita, rubies, sapphires, tourmalines — are selected with care from trusted sources.

This is not a brand position. It is a commtiment to say no to hurting our earth and others. The jewelry industry depends predominantly on unethically sourced materials — blood diamonds, Colombian "blood gold." Montealegre Atelier was founded as a model built on something else: love of the land, and human exchange.

To wear Montealegre Atelier is to express not only your aesthetic, but your ethics.

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