Dr. Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit) is an assistant professor of North American Indigenous Knowledge at the iSchool at the University of Washington and an independent curator. Indigenous knowledge systems are central to her work as she examines the role of social media and the arts in protecting, documenting, and perpetuating Native information and knowledge. Her work highlights and celebrates Native artists, their processes, and the exquisite pieces they create. She has worked with tribal, city, state, and federal museums to create Native-focused educational programming, publications, and art exhibitions. Belarde-Lewis holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona, an M.A. in Museology, and Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington.

Dr. Herman Piʻikea Clark is an artist, designer, and educator making drawings, paintings, textiles, sculptures, garments, and curriculum. As a keiki o ka ʻāina, he has long been inspired by his heritage and its connections with peoples and cultures across the Pacific. Since the late 1990s, Clark has played an active role in the development of an international network of Indigenous artist educators from Aotearoa to Canada. Confrontational at times and easygoing in others, his multifaceted practice—no matter its form—is always guided by his family’s deep ancestral roots across Hawaiʻi.

Yolanda Cruz (Chatina) Yolanda Cruz is an indigenous independent filmmaker from Oaxaca, Mexico. A member of the Chatino community of Oaxaca’s Sierra Sur region, she grew up speaking chatino, before migrating to Oaxaca City with her family, where she learned Spanish. As a teenager, she migrated to study and work in the USA. In her films, she draws from the tradition of oral storytelling to create narratives about art, migration, and indigenous cultures. Her two most recent feature films, Hope, Soledad, and La Raya, are the first films to be produced in the Chatino region and the first in the chatino language.

She is currently in post-production on La Raya, a comic drama produced by the Mexican Film Institute in collaboration with her community of Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Film School and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College. Cruz is also a Sundance Institute Fellow.

Dr. Robert Jahnke (Ngai Taharora, Te Whanau a Iritekura, Te Whanau a Rakairo o Ngati Porou) is an artist, writer, and curator working principally as a sculptor, although trained as a designer and animator. His work focuses on the dynamics of intercultural exchange and the politics of identity. Jahnke primarily teaches in the Master of Māori Visual Arts and PhD (Fine Arts) programs out of Massey University, Palmerston North. He has a Doctor of Philosophy (Māori Studies) from Massey University, supervised by Professor Mason Durie and awarded in 2006.

Dr. Kanako Uzawa is an Ainu scholar, artist, and rights advocate. She is the founder of AinuToday, a global online platform that delivers living Ainu culture and people. She is an Assistant Professor for the Global Station for Indigenous Studies and Cultural Diversity at Hokkaido University in Japan. Her most recent work engages with Ainu art exhibitions, as a guest curator in collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Art in the United States, and as an associated researcher at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo in Norway. She is also an editorial board member of AlterNative: an International Journal of Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand, Aotearoa.

Heidi K. Brandow (Diné and Kānaka Maoli) is an artist whose work prioritizes the inclusion of Indigenous people and perspectives in creating ethical and sustainable forms of creative engagement and artistic expression. Through her creative practice, Brandow explores themes of displacement, cultural identity, and the impacts of colonialism through the lens of the Kanaka Maoli and Diné peoples. Through her art, Brandow engages in social commentary and cultural reflection to spark conversations and raise awareness on vital issues.

As a Harvard Indigenous Design Collective co-founder, Brandow emphasizes Indigenous perspectives in design and advocates for their inclusion in the field's global discourse. She also contributes as a Master Artist Mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts, guiding the next generation of artists. Brandow's roles with the Coe Center for Art, Santa Fe, NM, highlight her commitment to Indigenous empowerment and cultural material reclamation. Brandow's diverse background, including education at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Istanbul Technical University, and Harvard Graduate School of Design, informs her multidisciplinary approach, which is rich in storytelling and symbolism and embodies the transformative power of art.

Dr. Mario A. Caro is the director of the MFA in Studio Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a researcher, curator, and critic of contemporary art, having published widely on the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art. His work within the academy complements his endeavors within various communities to promote global cultural exchanges.

Raven Chacon (Diné / Chicano) is a composer, performer, and installation artist born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on over eighty releases on national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Whitney Biennial, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, The Kennedy Center, and more. As an educator, Chacon is the senior composer mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

Andrea Carlson (Anishinaabe) is an artist from Chicago, Illinois, and her ancestral Ojibwe homeland in Grand Marais, Minnesota. Carlson’s practice includes painting, drawing, and arts writing on subjects ranging from museum studies to assimilation metaphors in film. Her work can be found in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and National Gallery of Canada. She has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2016), Chicago Artadia Award (2020), US Artists Fellowship (2021), and Creative Capital (2024). Carlson is a co-founder of the Center for Native Futures which sits on Potawatomi land in Chicago, Illinois.

Anna Hoover (Norwegian and Unangax̂) is an artist who creates a vision for the future. Through the work of writing and directing film, Anna shows us the places that remain where humanity strives for balance with our ancestors in the natural world, where Indigenous community knowledge is the foundation for growth. Nationally and internationally, Anna has worked with and screened her art at International Sami Film Institute, imagineNATIVE, Berlinale Native, Northwest Filmmakers, MoCNA, Maoriland, and multiple International Indigenous Artist Gatherings, BBC Earth, and the UNCOP26. Hoover is a mother, fisherwoman, pilot, and community activist. Anna is a writer for the twice Emmy-nominated PBS animated children’s television show Molly of Denali. Hoover strongly asserts intergenerational strategies in her approach to storytelling and art art-making and instruction.

Dr. Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq/Sugpiaq, b. 1976, Kodiak Island, USA) undertakes embodied inquiry in rehearsal, performance, video, installation, and writing. Her recent exhibitions include Aichi Triennale, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Toronto Biennial of Art. Her exhibition, Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather), including works from the last ten years and new commissions and curated by Kelly Kivland, will be presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2024. Released in spring 2024 and published on the occasion of her recent three-part exhibition of the same name, Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather, documents a series of significant recent works produced by Lukin Linklater at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Oakville Galleries; and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin. Her book, Slow Scrape (2nd edition, Talonbooks, Vancouver 2022), draws on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, and event scores, and can be read alongside her practice of choreography. She recently completed a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University with supervision by Dylan Robinson.

Dakota Mace (Diné) is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on translating the language of Diné history and beliefs. Mace received her MA and MFA in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BFA in Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts. As a Diné artist, her work draws from the history of her Diné heritage, exploring the themes of family lineage, community, and identity. In addition, her work pushes the viewer's understanding of Diné culture through alternative photographic techniques, weaving, beadwork, and papermaking. She is an MFA in Studio Arts Faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the photographer/research specialist for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Center and the Center of Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at various conferences, museums, and galleries. She is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City.

Dylan McLaughlin (Diné) is a multidisciplinary artist looking critically at ecologies of extraction and threatened ecosystems. He weaves Diné mythology, ecological data, and environmental histories while holding space for complexity. What transpires is the sonification of relationships to land through experimental music composition and improvised performance. In his multi-media installation and performative works, he looks to engage the poetics and politics of human relations to land. He is a recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT award, and has done residencies at Mass MoCA, BOXO Projects, Slow Research Lab and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received his BFA in New Media Art from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico. He is currently an Early Career Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jackson Polys is a Tlingit multi-disciplinary artist, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation fellowships, and a United States Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produces video, performance, and installation works that examine and aim to shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. His individual and collaborative works have appeared with the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Art Sonje, Artists Space, Creative Time, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MOMENTA Biennale de l'image, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial of Art, and the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.

Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa and Tonga) Jordan Poorman Cocker is a curator, artist, and an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. Cocker’s artistic and intellectual kinship is rooted in her Toyebo and Dohausan family legacies of Kiowa beadwork. Her curatorial practice centers on Indigenous research methodologies prioritizing reciprocity, sustained collaboration, and tribal sovereignty. She holds a Master of Museum and Heritage Practice from Victoria University of Wellington and a Bachelor of Design from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. She currently serves as the Curator of Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Before her appointment, Cocker served as the 2020 -2022 Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar of Indigenous Art at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is the 2021–25 Terra Foundation guest co-curator of Indigenous Art at the Block Museum of Art. She is an artist mentor for the Institute of American Indian Art’s Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Arts program.

Isabella Robbins is a Diné scholar and PhD candidate in the History of Art and American Studies departments at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Relationality and Being: Indigeneity, Space, and Transit in Global Contemporary Art,” interrogates the category of contemporary indigenous art to understand how indigeneity serves as a relational analytic in the work of artists across the settler states of Australia, Canada, and the U.S. She teaches Indigenous art history and theory courses in the IAIA Studio Arts MFA program. She has held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and Cantor Arts Center, and is on the board of The Chapter House, a Native women-led community arts organization, and the Diné Studies Association.

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) is a master artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakama) and her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, traditional Indigenous weaving, and large-scale installation. Her art practice branches into education and institutional reform and these concepts directly influence and are reflected in her artwork and public presence. She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon.

Yvonne Tiger is a Citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and is also of the Seminole and Mvskoke Nations. She is a PhD candidate in the Cultural, Social and Political Thought program at the University of Lethbridge. A first-generation college graduate, Tiger holds an AB degree from Smith College, and two MAs from the University of Oklahoma, in 20th c. U.S. History, and in Native American Studies—Native American Art History and Curating, studies conducted within OU’s department of Art History. Her current research connects Cherokee pottery to the land in kinship as a place-based art and to her mound building ancestors from whom pottery making came. She also works in Indigenous refusal and has structured an ethical Indigenous methodological approach to her citational practice. She is an Indigenous art historian and teaches Indigenous studies and art history courses at the University of Lethbridge and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. She has held fellowships at the Peabody-Essex Museum, with the Momus Emerging Indigenous Critics Residency, and Otsego Institute for Native American Art History. She was a Scholar-in-Residence at Smith College and is a Cobell Scholar.

Cole Taylor (Dakota) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice ranges from customary work to producing art that historicizes his Mdewakanton Dakota community.

Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné) is a mother and an artist. She is a painter and a ledger artist using colored pencils on antique documents. She enjoys depicting Native empowerment using the female form as her main subject.

Ursala Hudson (Tlingit) Hudson explores her experience as a modern-day, globalized Indigenous Woman with mixed ancestry through her artwork. Her garments have walked the runway at Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto, Adäka Festival in British Columbia, and the SWAIA runway invitational in Santa Fe, NM.

Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo) Wall created her first storyteller when she was 8. She descends from a long line of ceramic artists. From her grandmother, Cari Loretto of Jemez Pueblo, who taught six daughters, to her mother Fannie, who taught her in turn, Kathleen has supported herself as a working artist from the age of 17.

Kimberly Fulton Orozco (Haida, Mexicana, Anglo) is a multidisciplinary producer of storytelling projects. She holds a BFA in Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking from Georgia State University. Her work is deeply rooted in the storytelling traditions of her Haida ancestors.

Shannon Hooper (Paiute and Shoshone) is an interdisciplinary artist who creates Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone traditional and contemporary arts while promoting a positive representation of Northern Nevada Native Americans.

Kathleen Ash-Milby is the Curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum, appointed in 2019. Previously, she organized numerous solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian with artists including Oscar Howe (2022), Kay WalkingStick (2015), Meryl McMaster (2015), C. Maxx Stevens (2012), and Julie Buffalohead (2012). Her critically acclaimed thematic group exhibitions of Native art across a range of media include Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound (2021) and Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination (2007). From 2001 to 2005, she was curator and co-director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City, a foundational community-based nonprofit gallery. Ash-Milby has published widely, including contributions to books, exhibition catalogues, and publications such as Art in America and Art Journal. In 2015, she was a fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership Program in New York. A member of the Navajo Nation, she earned her master of arts in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico.

Sonya Clark is an artist and the Winifred L. Arms Professor of Art at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Previously, she held a University Professorship in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University where she served as chair for the Craft/Material Studies Department for over a decade. She earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received an honorary doctorate in 2023. Her first college degree is from Amherst College where, in 2015, she also received an honorary doctorate. In 2021, she was awarded additional honorary doctorates from Franklin and Marshall College and Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in over 500 museums and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. Clark is the recipient of many awards including a United States Artist Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Rappaport Prize, Art Prize, Pollock Krasner Award, Art Matters Grant, and several others. She been an artist at the Red Gate Residency in China, the BAU Camargo Residency in France, the Rockefeller Bellagio Residency in Italy, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in DC, the Civitella Ranieri Residency in Italy, Yaddo Residency in NY, Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Indigo Arts Alliance in Maine, Bogliasco Residency in Italy, Black Rock Senegal Residency, and others. Her work has been favorably reviewed in the New York Times, Le Monde, Sculpture, Art in America, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, ArtForum, PBS, NPR, BBC and many others.

Christian Ayne Crouch is Dean of Graduate Studies, Professor of History and American and Indigenous Studies, and Director of the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College. She is an award-winning historian, author of Nobility Lost (Cornell 2014), and has published on topics in Atlantic military and material culture, French empire, and Indigenous and African diasporic history in journals such as the Early American Studies, William and Mary Quarterly, Panorama, Journal of the Early Republic as well on contemporary Indigenous arts, including in Beyond the Horizon (2020) and Making American Artists (2022). Her research has been supported by institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Newberry Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the John Carter Brown Library. Her current book project, Queen Victoria's Captive: A Story of Ambition, Empire, and a Stolen Ethiopian Prince explores the human and material consequences of the 1868 East African Maqdala Campaign. She also works in contemporary Native American art curation and criticism, serving as a consultant, speaker, and curatorial advisor for the Hessel Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire is Applied to a Stone It Cracks (2020). She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and an A.B. with honors from Princeton University.

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context. His first book, Playing Indian (1998), traced the tradition of white “Indian play” from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early twentieth century and the ways Native Americans challenged them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance. He is the co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (with Neal Salisbury) and co-author, with Alexander Olson, of American Studies: A User’s Guide (2017). His most recent book Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019) explores family history and the abstract designs and social interpretation of Dakota Sioux artist, Mary Sully, and has led him to a series of writings focused on music and art. He is currently finishing a book on the epistemological worlds made visible by the extraordinary Leonid meteor storm of 1833. Deloria previously taught at the University of Colorado and University of Michigan, where he held the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Chair. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

Divide and Dissolve is the Melbourne-based instrumental doom metal band of soprano saxophonist and guitarist Takiaya Reed (Black//Cherokee). Divide and Dissolve are committed to creating music that “honouring ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation.” Divide and Dissolve’s album Systemic (2023), produced by Ruban Nielson, followed their atmospheric debut album Gas Lit (2021), distributed by the Invada label. Divide and Dissolve have recently supported Chelsea Wolfe on her North American tour with critical acclaim. With the band's tectonic sound, Takiaya has created original film scores and experimental classical solo performances. She opened the 2024 Sculpture Center summer program in New York , followed by a headline tour across the US commencing in September.

Ginger Dunnill - Originally from Maui, Hawai’i, New Mexico based creative Ginger Dunnill is producer, journalist, curator, community organizer, DJ and sound artist. She collaborates with artists globally, creating work that inspires human connection, promotes plurality and advocates for social justice. Ginger is the founder of Broken Boxes Podcast, the decade long celebrated underground broadcasting project amplifying revolutionary voices in the arts. Ginger has exhibited internationally including at IoDeposito, Italy, Washington Project for The Arts, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Over the past two decades Ginger has produced numerous social engagement projects, community programs and public exhibitions in collaboration with other artists and activists. She is currently working as a creative advisor for numerous prominent artists and musicians and touring the world as a DJ and performer.

Jeffrey Gibson (born 1972) is an interdisciplinary artist. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea. He received a bachelor of fine arts in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and master of arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Claremont Graduate University (2016) and the Institute of American Indian Arts (2023). He is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard College. Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2012), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019). Gibson also conceived and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She is a mentor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Dinaw Mengetsu is the author of four novels, Someone Like Us (Knopf 2024), All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He is the director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College, and the director of the Center for Ethics and Writing.

Jamie Okuma, a Luiseno, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, and Okinawan is an enrolled member of the La Jolla band of Indians in Southern California where she lives and works. She specializes in one-of-a-kind pieces that are hand-executed exclusively by the artist herself in all details of process, while also designing ready to wear fashion. After high school Okuma took graphic design classes at Palomar College in San Marcos, California before attending the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Exhibiting her work at the Heard Indian Art Market in Phoenix, Arizona, and at the Santa Fe Indian Art Market in Santa Fe, she has garnered a total of seven Best in Show awards: four from the Heard Museum and three from the Santa Fe Indian Market and is one of only two artists to achieve this distinction. Since that time her work has traveled the globe. She has most recently became the first Native American inducted into The Council of Fashion Designers of America otherwise known as the CFDA. Okuma’s work is in the permanent collections of leading institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and many more. In 2023, Okuma was appointed a commissioner to the Indian Arts and Crafts Act Board by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.

Jami Powell (she/her) is the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College where she also serves as a senior lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department. Powell is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her tenure at the Hood Museum, Powell has curated exhibitions including Form and Relation: Contemporary Native American Ceramics, CIPX Dartmouth with Kali Spitzer and Will Wilson, Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting from Yirrkala, and This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World. Powell’s co-edited volume titled Re-Envisioning American Art: Transforming Museum Practice will be released in January 2025. She is on the board of directors for the Native American Art Studies Association and serves on advisory boards for Panorama and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Powell’s upcoming projects include the first solo exhibition and catalogue for Chemehuevi photographer and artist Cara Romero.

Jolene Rickard is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020. She is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous art, cultural theory and the forces of settler colonialism. Her research centers on the expression of multiple sovereignties within Indigenous art and culture globally and she has been at the forefront of comparative understandings of global Indigenous art with research projects in the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand). She has served as a curator and curatorial advisor, most recently for Deskaheh in Geneva, 1923-2023 : Defending Haudenosaunee Sovereignty (Geneva, Switzerland, 2023) and in an ongoing role as consultant to the Niagara Falls State Park (NYS) interpretive museum. She also co-curated two of the four inaugural exhibitions of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (2004-2014). She is on the editorial board of American Art, a founding board member for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art and is a member of the Forge Project’s Indigenous Steering Council. She is a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, Turtle Clan and holds a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo.

White People Killed Them is a project that came together in 2019, one of several imaginings of new designations, calamities, and celebrations by group members when they all happened to be together in New Mexico. The musical space and interaction modeled by the trio allows for “all ideas to be heard and considered, forming a unified whole that does not trivialize any of its individual parts.” The name of the band, which is also the name of the project, is a group of words commonly paraphrased on many monuments across the United States. Their self-titled debut LP was released on the indie label SIGE Records in 2021.

White People Killed Them is a trio that includes composer Raven Chacon, guitarist John Dieterich, and percussionist Marshall Trammell. Raven Chacon was born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation in 1977. Since 1999 he has toured the United States with various solo and group projects, composed chamber works, and developed a curriculum for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, an education initiative to mentor young composers on the Navajo, Hopi and Salt River Pima reservations. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); amongst many others. He has performed or had works performed at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2013); Borealis Festival, Bergen, Norway (2021); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2022); the Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York (2023); Holland Festival, Amsterdam, NL (2023); and Ostrava Festival (2023); in addition to hundreds of concerts over the past 25 years. In 2022, Chacon received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. Self-styled Music Research Strategist Marshall Trammell is a US-born, California-based Experimental/Creative Music percussionist, conductor, and Digital Community Archives Project Manager and Curator. A founding member of White People Killed Them (SIGE Records), Trammell performs with a number of Creative Improvised Music outfits. He is currently a resident artist at the Sonic Acts Biennale (Amsterdam) and ArabAmp/Temescal Art Center (TACmusic) in Oakland, CA. John Dieterich is a Minnesota-based guitarist and composer in the band Deerhoof, which he has been a member of since 1999. In that time, Deerhoof has released 25 critically acclaimed albums, toured extensively throughout the world, collaborated with jazz luminaries (including Wadada Leo Smith and Nels Cline), physicist James Beacham (as part of the first musical performance at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider), Konono No. 1, and created an original score to Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic. In addition, John has been or continues to be a member of a number of collaborative groups, including Endlings, White People Killed Them, Claire Cronin, Gorge Trio, Powerdove, Colossamite, Natural Dreamers, his duets with guitarist Mary Halvorson and Tashi Dorji, and many others.

Abigail Winograd is an independent curator and writer. She was previously curator-at-large and MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator at the University of Chicago's Gray Center for the Arts and Inquiry, a role she originated at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. She is currently co-director and chief curator of Pueblo Unido Gallery, a community-generated art space situated within Centro Romero, a social service organization serving and advocating for the immigrant community on Chicago's North Side. Winograd's scholarly work focuses on postwar abstraction in South America and institutional approaches to expanding canonical histories. She has held positions at the Frans Hals Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Blanton Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago and has curated exhibitions around the world. She has contributed to books and museum catalogues, published academic articles, and written for publications such as Bomb, Mousse Magazine, Frieze, and Artforum. She received a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin and has additional degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.