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.
A member of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache Tribe of Oklahoma and New Mexico, Mithlo is an active curator. She has led nine exhibits at the La Biennale di Venezia, the subject of her forthcoming book, Red Skin Dreams. Her co-edited book Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2022.