Nancy Marie Mithlo

Nancy Marie Mithlo, Ph.D. (Chiricahua Apache) is a Professor of Gender Studies and an Affiliated Faculty with the American Indian Studies Center and the Interdepartmental Program at University of California Los Angeles. Her curatorial work has resulted in nine exhibitions at the Venice Biennale. Formerly an Associate Professor of Art History at Occidental College and Chair of American Indian studies at the Autry Museum of the American West (Los Angeles), in 2017/18, she served as a University of California Los Angeles Institute of American Cultures, American Indian Studies Center Visiting Scholar, a Brown University George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow and a Getty Research Institute Guest Researcher.

Using interviews from key contemporary American Indian women artists over a 20-year time frame, her first manuscript, “Our Indian Princess”: Subverting the Stereotype, (School of Advanced Research Press 2009) demonstrated how derogatory images that can and do inflict harm may also be mobilized through creative inversion, re-appropriation and critique as inert and useful interpretative formats. Mithlo’s scholarly intervention considers the Venice Biennale as a site of knowledge-production – an inert space where various agendas of inclusion and exclusion can be experienced, debated and ultimately theorized. Her manuscript A/Part of This World: Indigenous Curation at the Venice Biennale is under contract with the State University of New York Press. A volume of her collected essays titled Knowing Native Arts will be published with the University of Nebraska Press. Mithlo has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Smith College, California Institute for the Arts and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

http://www.nancymariemithlo.com