Nanette Snoep is the Director of the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony, including the GRASSI Leipzig Museum of Ethnography, Dresden Museum of Ethnography, and the Hermhut Museum of Ethnology). Previously, she was Chief Curator of the historical collection of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, where she had been involved since 1999. There, she developed the acclaimed exhibition “Exhibitions - l'invention du sauvage” together with soccer player Lillian Thuram.

Laura Osorio Sunnucks is the Mellon Curatorial Fellow for Latin America at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. She completed her doctorate with a dissertation entitled "Personhood in Maya Art; a Theoretical Perspective" at Leiden University and holds an Archaeology BA from University College London. Laura has been a curator at the British Museum and has worked in education and programming at the Louvre Museum and UNESCO, Paris. Her research explores source community collaboration in the interpretation and management of Mesoamerican heritage. 

Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda is a Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.  After receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley, he was a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and then served as Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego.  His primary academic interests include international migration, diasporas, ethnic minorities, ethnic and national identity, transnationalism and globalization, ethnic return migrants, and the Japanese diaspora in the Americas.  His current research examines Japanese Americans across the generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ethnic heritage.  He is the author of Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Japanese American Ethnicity: In Search of Heritage and Homeland across Generations (New York University Press, 2016).  He is also editor of Diasporic Homecomings: Ethnic Return Migration in Comparative Perspective (Stanford University Press, 2009) and Local Citizenship in Recent Countries of Immigration: Japan in Comparative Perspective (Lexington Books, 2006), and co-editor of Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (second edition, Stanford University Press, 2004), Ethnic Identity: Problems and Prospects for the Twenty-first Century (AltaMira Press, 2006), and Migration and Disruptions: Toward a Unified Theory of Ancient and Contemporary Migrations (University Press of Florida, forthcoming). 

Alberto Ríos de la Rosa is an art historian and curator at Fundación Casa Wabi, México. He holds a MA in History of Art with a concentration on global conceptualism from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He has worked in the curatorial team of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. He currently writes for local publications. 

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Néstor García Canclini is an anthropologist and social theorist at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City and is the Director of its urban studies program. Canclini is one of Latin America’s most prominent social scientists. He has been professor of the universities of Austin, Duke, Stanford, Barcelona, ​​Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. He has shaped much of modern Mexican anthropology. His earlier study of craft production around Lake Patzcuaro, traced the historical origins of village craft specialisation and the mechanisms underlying the operation of the colonial and Independence period markets. His ethnography of the region looked at the transformation of the area, beginning in the 1960s, and its re-accomodation into a global economic system. He has also done work on masquerade arguing that invented and tourist masks need to be understood in relation to changes in the established ceremonial cycle and the sponsorship of masquerades. His award-winning book, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (2005), examines different aspects of Mexican culture, economy and democracy to question its relationship with globalized economies. The chapter on the National Museum of Anthropology is incisive. Canclini’s current research focuses on the relationships between aesthetics, art, anthropology, creative strategies and cultural networks of young people.

Anna Chiara Cimoli is an art historian and museum consultant based in Milan. After graduating in Art History, she earned a diploma in Museology at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and a Ph.D. in History of Architecture from the Polytechnic of Turin. She has taught at the Polytechnic and the at the Catholic University in Milan. In 2012-14, she has collaborated as a free-lance researcher at the MeLa* Project-European Museums in an age of migrations, within the Polytechnic of Milan research unit. Within the project, she has curated “The Memory of the Sea”, an exhibition about the Sea Memory Museum in Zarzis, Tunisia. She has published extensively in the fields of inclusion and accessibility to culturally diverse audiences (chapters in Whitehead et al., Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe, Gouriévidis, Museums and Migration, and Basso Peressut at al., European Museums in the 21st Century: Setting the Framework). Che cosa vedi?, a book about teenagers at the museum, was published in March 2017. An associate of Abcittà cooperative company, Cimoli collaborates as a consultant with public and private cultural institutions (Museo del Novecento and MUDEC in Milan) and designs training courses for museum staff (mainly about audience engagement, accessibility of museum texts and participation). She is the editor of the blog museumsandmigration.wordpress.com (with Maria Vlachou).

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Rochelle Davis is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her main research is on forced migration, war, and conflict, particularly Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, (Stanford University Press, 2012) addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war, and the stories and commemorations of village life that are circulated in the diaspora. She is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She holds a BA in Art History (University of California, Davis), an MA/PhD in Modern Arabic Literature, and a PhD in Anthropology (University of Michigan). She is a board member of the Palestine Poster Project Archive, a web-based archive of over 10,000 posters.

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Gwyneira Isaac’s research investigates knowledge systems and the relationships societies develop with their past, especially as to how this is expressed through material culture and museums. Central to this study is her ethnography of a tribal museum in the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico, where she examined the difficulties faced by Zunis operating between Zuni and Euro-American approaches to knowledge. Through the book Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Museum for the Zuni People (2007), she argues that the Zuni museum reconciled the different approaches to knowledge both within its own constituency and cross-culturally, and consequently, that it took on the role of mediator between internal and external expectations about Zuni history. Isaac’s explorations into the intersection of different knowledges (either culturally or disciplinarily distinct) include how technology and media are used within the discipline of anthropology. The ethnography of media in museums and anthropology has led her to study values attributed to the reproduction of knowledge as explored through replicas and models, and explored in ‘Whose Ideas Was This? Replicas, Museums and the Reproduction of Knowledge' in Current Anthropology (2011). Bridging the study of Native American knowledge systems and the history of anthropology has resulted in her interest in developing theories that integrate anthropology, history and art to form interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to understand the intersections between culturally specific knowledge systems. Her recent collaborative work at the Smithsonian as part of the Recovering Voices initiative resulted in the development of a methodological platform focused on the applied synthesis of research, as a means to understand and integrate the production of new knowledge within interdisciplinary research on endangered languages.  

University in 1998. He was visiting scholar at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History (1992) under at the auspices of Smithsonian Grants and in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University under the auspices of Fulbright (1994-95). He was a Fellow at Gilder Lehrman Residential Fellowship – Rockefeller Library – Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Visiting Scholar at The College of William and Mary (2007) – US. He was senior visiting scholar at  the Department of Anthropology of the Washington University in Saint Louis under the auspices of Fulbright and CAPES - Brasil, (2014). He was pos-doc senior Fellow at the National Museum – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro under the auspices of FAPERJ (2014-2015).He was professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute Goiano of Anthropology and Pre-History of the Catholic University of Goiás (Brazil), coordinator of the master’s degree program in cultural heritage management and Director (2001-2003) at the same institution. He is researcher of The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, CNPq, (Brazil) since 2007. He is member board of the Scientific Council of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology ABA (2014-2018). His current position is professor since 2009 at the  Federal University of Goias (UFG), graduate and undergraduate classes of Anthropology, and researcher of Museum of Anthropology of the same institution.  His research interests include Ethnology, Cultural Heritage, Museums, Identity and Social Memory. 

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Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator (Ph.D. + Museum Studies Certificate from University of Michigan 2005). She is currently Associate Professor in the departments of History and SociologyAnthropology and Canada Research Chair in Museum & Heritage Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press 2013); editor (with Shelley Butler) of Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (McGill-Queens 2016); (with Michael Meng) of Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015); and (with Cynthia Milton et al) of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave 2011). In 2013 she curated the exhibit Souvenir, Talisman, Toy at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, and in 2014 published the accompanying book Lucky Jews and the online exhibit www.luckyjews.com. She has pursued an experimental practice of analytical/critical, curatorial, and collaborative pedagogical engagements with Jewish heritage in Poland, and particularly Krakow with its Ethnographic Museum. Her current project is titled Awkward Objects of Genocide: the Holocaust and Vernacular Arts of Witness in and beyond Polish Ethnographic Museums, which will include an exhibition in Poland in 2018 (see: http://bit.ly/2kGNjfZ). 

Corinne Kratz is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University and Emory Director for the African Critical Inquiry Program. She writes on culture and communication; the histories and politics of visual and verbal representation, particularly in museums, exhibitions, and photography; and performance and ritual. Kratz’s books include Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation and The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, which won both the Collier Prize and honorable mention for the Rubin Outstanding Publication Award. She has published numerous articles, curated museum exhibitions, and co-edited Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Kratz has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and others. She is currently on the Council for Museum Anthropology Board and research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art.

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Nicola Levell (PhD, UCL) is assistant professor of museum and visual anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She has held curatorial positions at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums Brighton and at the Horniman Museum, London. She has worked on over ten exhibitions and was lead curator of two major shows: The Centenary Gallery: 100 Years of Collecting (2001-2016, London) and The Marvellous Real: Art from Mexico, 1926-2011 (2013-14, Vancouver), as well as a number of installations including Seduction: Raven Kept on Walking (2010) for Ethnographic Terminalia (2010, New Orleans; 2011-12, Austin Texas). She is currently curating a gallery Lucha Libre! with masks, prints, comics and film (opening 2017, Lisbon). Her publications have encompassed the history of collectors and ethnographic collections, contemporary artists, critical curatorial practice, performance and institutional critique. She is the author of numerous articles, an edited volume and two monographs: Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel and Collecting in the Victorian Age (2001), and The Seriousness of Play: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (2016). Her current research project (2016-18), funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, seeks to construct a critical and comparative historigraphy of the intervention of contemporary art as cultural critique in anthropology museums in Europe and North America, from the 1980s to the present. It is within this framework of critical exhibitions that her research on borders is situated.  

Diana E. Marsh is a museum theorist and practitioner. Her research explores how galleries, archives, libraries and museums share knowledge with Indigenous communities and the public. She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society (APS), where she is researching digital knowledge sharing in Native communities. She is currently curating an exhibition on Charles Willson Peale. In 2015-2016 was co-curator on the exhibition “Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America,” which showcased the APS’s Native American and Indigenous archival collections, and their re-use in communities today. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in Museum Anthropology at UBC where she taught undergraduate courses on museums, heritage and curatorial practice. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2014, where she conducted ethnographic and archival research on fossil exhibitions at the Smithsonian. From Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: The Ethnography of Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Exhibitions is contracted for publication with Berghahn Books’ Museums and Collections Series. She completed an MPhil. in Social Anthropology with a Museums and Heritage focus at Cambridge in 2010 and a B.F.A. in Visual Art (photography) from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2009.

Fuyubi Nakamura (D.Phil. Oxford) is a sociocultural anthropologist. She joined the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) as its curator for Asia in 2014. She is an associate member of the Departments of Anthropology and Asian Studies at UBC, and has taught at the Australian National University, the University of Tokyo, the University of Oxford and UBC. Her exhibitions include Ephemeral but Eternal Words: Traces of Asia (Canberra, 2010), Traces of Time, Traces of Words (Buenos Aires, 2011) and (In)visible: The Spiritual World of Taiwan through Contemporary Art (Vancouver, 2015–16). Her publications include Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and “Memory in the debris: The 3/11 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami” in Anthropology Today (2012). Her investigation into the production and consumption of Japanese calligraphy has developed over multiple global locations including Argentina and Brazil.More information about her projects and publications: https://ubc.academia.edu/FuyubiNakamura

William Nitzky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Chico. His research interests include cultural heritage, museum studies, rural development, and ethnicity. His previous publications include safeguarding living heritage (Museum International, UNESCOICOM), participatory approaches to heritage protection (Cultural Heritage Politics in China), and ecomuseum development in rural China (Urban Anthropology). Since 2012, he has served as a guest researcher at Guangxi Museum for Nationalities and a research consultant for the China National Committee on Ecomuseum and Community Museum Development on community museum and heritage projects.

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Morgan Perkins (D.Phil Oxford) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Art and Director of the Museum Studies Program at the State University of New York – Potsdam. Much of his writing and exhibition curation explores the transmission of cultural knowledge through the work of migrant and indigenous artists, including Nigerian, Chinese, Haudenosaunee and other Native American artists. Through a series of ongoing projects, he has developed a recent focus upon the impact of migration and displacement on indigenous communities. He is the co-editor of The Anthropology of Art (2006) and Asia Through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (2013). He is particularly interested in the potential for this workshop to address the current refugee crisis through the development of travelling exhibitions curated in collaboration with members of the affected communities.

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Nuno Porto was trained as a social anthropologist. He conducted long term fieldwork in Portugal in the early 1990s, studying the relationships between literacy skills acquisition and gendered cultural knowledges. Later, in his PhD dissertation, he explored the articulation of colonialism, science, and museum culture, and how these merged in the co-development of the Dundo Museum in Northeast of Angola and of its proprietor, the Diamonds Company of Angola. From 1991 to 2011, Porto taught at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, on subjects related to theory in social anthropology, material culture, critical museology, visual culture, photography and African studies. He was also the Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra between 2002 and 2006, where he developed a series of temporary exhibitions under the notion of ‘ethnographic installation.’  At the MOA since 2012, he has focused on self-representation of African identities in contemporary Afro-Cuban Art and in Kenyan popular photography. In 2016, he curated Cherie Mose’s sound installation in the museum’s Multiversity Galleries, questioning how the status of migration can apply both to artefacts and to persons, and disrupting the ocular centric regime of displays. He also initiated an advanced seminar on African Art, an absolute première in UBC’s history. His current exhibition focusing on the Rights of Nature that explores transformations of indigenous knowledge into national legislation, brings new understandings to Amazonian material culture. As a curator, Porto is interested on how genres create borders and on how to creatively disrupt them both.

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Anthony Shelton BA (Hull), M.Litt. (Oxon), D.Phil. (Oxon), professor of art history, visual art and theory and the director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, has held curatorial positions at the British Museum, Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums Brighton, and at the Horniman Museum London. He has served on the international advisory boards of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin and the Asian Cultural Complex, Gwangju and has held parallel faculty positions at the University of East Anglia, University of Sussex, University College London and the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He has done fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala, the American Southwest and Portugal. His more than 150 publications include Art Anthropology and Aesthetics (1992); Museums and Changing Perspectives of Culture (1995), Collectors (two volumes 2001), Fetishism. Visualizing Power and Desire (1995), Luminescence (2012), and Heaven, Hell and Somewhere In between. Portuguese Popular Art (2015). He has curated fifteen major international exhibitions, the latest of which, Mexican Masks. An Assembly of Imaginary Beings, will open at the Museu do Cidade, Lisbon in July 2017.

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Pan Shouyong is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Museum Studies, Central University for Nationalities, Department of Ethnological Studies at Minzu University of China in Beijing. He obtained his B.A. in Archaeology and Museum Studies from Jilin University, his M.A. in History and Museology from Nankai University, and his Ph.D. in Ethnology from the Central University for Nationalities. He has been a researcher at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, where his project was titled, “Revisiting History: A New Study of Taitou Village,” where he re-examined a community that was featured prominently in early influential writings by Chinese anthropologists, and the Chinese Museum of National Minorities. Shouyong was previously in charge of the conservation strategy for the cultural protection of national minority customs of the peoples of the Three Gorges Reservoir District, as well as the rescue mission for China’s national minority cultural artefacts and the large-scale conservation of cultural heritage. His most recently published articles principally include The Century’s National Treasures II (editor-in-chief, 2005), Developmental Aspects of Research in Modern Western Museums (editor-in-chief, 2005) and The Eco-Museum as Mirror (2007).

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Boris Wastiau has been Director of the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève since February 2009. He is a tenured professor at the University of Geneva. Wastiau was educated at the Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Coimbra and the University of East Anglia (MA, 1993; Ph.D., 1997). In 2001, as curator for the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, he was author and curator on the exhibition, ExltCongoMuseum, a pioneering contribution to critical curatorship. ExitCongoMuseum at the Museum of Central Africa, Brussels had huge impact in expressing an alternative genre and the utility in including reflexivity in exhibitions. He is currently director of the Museum of Ethnography Geneva which he has linked to the Indigenous Caucus of the UN. His current exhibition Amazonie, deconstructs Western encounters with the Amazon while championing Indigenous perspectives and political commitment to social justice and human rights issues. The exhibition brought together Amazonian activists with contemporary Brazilian artists to envisage the difference in Indigenous ontological and epistemological perspectives and visions of the world.

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Leslie Witz is a professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. His major research centres on how different histories are created and represented in the public domain through memorials, museums, festivals and tourism. He has been on the board of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum since 2000 and became intensely involved in a set of hands-on collaborations with other board members, museum staff, residents and the appointed professionals in the making of the museum. He is the author of: Write Your Own History and Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts, and co-author, with Noëleen Murray of Hostels, Homes Museum: memoralising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa. Leslie, together with colleagues Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkley, is publishing a book through University of Michigan Press that reflects on public history in South Africa since the 1990s entitled Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts 

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