Biography

Nancy Marie Mithlo is a scholar of race and representation who studies the social production and circulation of American Indian/Indigenous arts and cultures nationally and internationally. Her training as a cultural anthropologist (Stanford University PhD, 1993) informs the ethnographic case study and institutional critique approaches she utilizes.

Mitho’s research offers a corrective lens to the often biased and narrow reading of American Indian cultures by focusing on the interior lives and motivations of Native artists in the politicized context of settler colonialism. She analyzes and exposes the politics of memory institutions – museums, archives, film, and fine arts. Her work goes beyond the often celebratory and descriptive art historical analyses of objects and their circulation by utilizing an empirical approach to theorization, working from an inductive or grounded theoretical analysis. Her most recent research employs cognitive science approaches to visitor reception studies. She remains active in Indigenous archival studies through her writing, teaching and research.

A citizen of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache Tribe, Mithlo is an active curator employing American Indian Curatorial Practice mandates of work that is long-term, mutually meaningful, reciprocal and with mentorship. She has led nine exhibits at the La Biennale di Venezia, the subject of her forthcoming book, Red Skin Dreams. A life-long educator, Mithlo has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Santa Fe Community College, Smith College, California Institute of the Arts, Occidental College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her co-edited book Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2022.

Selected Publications