Welcoming two new team members!

  • Sep 23, 2020

We are thrilled to be working with two new Senior Research and Storytelling Fellows, please join us in welcoming them! Sending socially distanced virtual elbow bumps their way.

Ruth Miller (Łchavaya K’isen) is a Dena’ina Athabaskan and Ashkenazi Russian Jewish woman, raised in Dgheyay Kaq (Anchorage), Alaska. She is a member of the Curyung Tribe from the Lake Iliamna region, and also has roots in Bristol Bay. She is a recent graduate from Brown University, built on occupied Wampanoag and Narragansett lands, and received a BA in Critical Development Studies with a focus on Indigenous resistance and liberation. Ruth is a Storytelling Fellow with The Natural History Museum and Climate Justice Organizer for Native Movement, a matriarchal grassroots Indigenous organization that fights for the rights of Indigenous peoples, our lands and waters, and justice for our ancestors and descendants. She has worked many years towards climate justice and a regenerative economy for all on her lands and beyond, her work also includes international advocacy, including attending the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Youth Climate Summit, COP25 in Madrid, Spain, and the Continental Gathering of Indigenous Women of the Americas (ECMIA). She is a daughter, a granddaughter, and aunty, a language learner, a traditional beadworker, and a subsistence fisherwomxn.

Mark Auslander, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow with The Natural History Museum, and a Research Scholar in Anthropology at Brandeis University. He previously served as Director of the Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University, and Director of the Michigan State University Museum of Science and Culture. He has taught Museum Studies and Anthropology at Brandeis, Emory, Haverford, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. He has particular interests in museum practice and the politics of race, in Africa, the African Diaspora and in African American communities. His research has centered on the ways in which exhibitionary complexes and memorialization practices allow, often in subtle and nuanced ways, for innovative forms of popular critique and political participation within historically-excluded communities. Mark the founding editor of the blog, “Art Beyond Quarantine,” exploring artistic responses to Covid-19 around the world.