Nancy Marie Mithlo

Nancy Marie Mithlo is a Chiricahua Apache curator, writer, and professor. Mithlo has worked as the chair of American Indian Studies at the Autry National Center Institute and as a professor of gender studies and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author and editor of several books about Native Americans and Indigenous art. Her exhibitions have been shown concurrently with the Venice Biennale.

Biography Mithlo is Chiricahua Apache, is enrolled in the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, and has family in Apache, Oklahoma. She was born in 1961 and grew up in Mississippi.

Mithlo attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and earned her bachelor's degree from Appalachian State University in 1986, and her master's degree in anthropology from Stanford University in 1988. In 1993, she earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Stanford University.

Work Mithlo has worked as the chair of American Indian Studies at the Autry National Center Institute. She has worked as a professor of gender studies and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mithlo has helped curate and create nine collateral exhibitions during the Venice Biennale. In the exhibition, "The People's Home: The United American Indian Involvement Photographic Project" held at These Days Gallery in 2019, Mithlo looks into how Native Americans live in modern Los Angeles.

Mithlo edited Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism in 2011. Native Peoples magazine wrote that Manifestations contained "an excellent cross-section of the Indigenous art community today." In 2014, Mithlo edited a book about the work of Horace Poolaw, For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw. The Daily Beast called the book "an outstanding work of scholarship and a commanding visual document." Mithlo edited Making History, published by UNM Press, in late 2020. Mithlo describes the purpose of Making History is to provide "a scaffold of resources for emerging Native arts scholars, Native and non-Native readers, students, and academics who wish to understand the tenor and tone of what this field is about and how to approach teaching and learning about American Indian arts."

Selected bibliography

Making History. University of New Mexico Press. 2020. ISBN 978-0826362094.