Patricia Marroquin Norby

Patricia Marroquin Norby (born 1970) is an American curator of Native American art. On September 14, 2020, she became the first full-time curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She left her role there in 2025.

Background Patricia Marroquin, born in 1970 in Chicago, Illinois. She has claimed to be of Purépecha Norby moved to Washington, D.C. in 2002. The same year she used black ink and leaves to create "Family Medicine" and other artwork which was published in a Chicana and Chicano art magazine. Her scholarship explored ways in which "European Americans have historically manipulated American Indian images to create a non-American Indian perspective." Her 2013 dissertation, "Visual Violence in the Land of Enchantment," addressed how modern nuclear power and industrial agriculture are reflected in fine art. Norby filmed interviews with Native Americans about their urban life experiences in a film called "Powwow".

Career Norby was the director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 2016, she presented "Indians in the Archives: American Indian Art at the Newberry".

She was an assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Norby served a short stint as senior executive and assistant director of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Norby explored the value of including Native American artists and communities in cultural institutions in the United States in "Museums Pivot: Shifting Paradigms for Collaboration" at the Indian Arts Research Centers' program, where she was keynote speaker, in 2021. She was one of several board members of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts along with board chair L. Stephanie Poston (Sandia Pueblo), and board members Walter Lamar (Blackfeet Tribe), Russell Sanchez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), and JoAnn Chase (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara).

In 2020, Norby became the first full-time curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scudeler, June, and Patricia Marroquin Norby. 2015. "Art, Aesthetics, and Indigenous Ways of Knowing". American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 39 (4): ix-xi. Norby, Patricia Marroquin. Forthcoming. Water, Bones, and Bombs: Three Artists and the Fight for Northern New Mexico. University of Nebraska Press.