GDS: Where Everything is Alive – Mind and Body in the Southwest with Penn Alumni

WCDFW Joins Penn Alumni

Join Lucy Fowler Williams, Associate Curator and Sabloff Keeper of American Collections at the Penn Museum, as she introduces her current projects involving Native perspectives on land, history, and art. Her area of specialty is Southwest Tewa Pueblo textiles and material culture, and her work in the American Section focuses on the study and stewardship of the Penn Museum’s Native American collections to make them accessible to the Museum’s many publics. Her work includes inviting and amplifying Native American voices and perspectives that help bring the collections to life by connecting back to their home source communities, contexts, and concerns.

Lucy Fowler Williams is Associate Curator and Senior Keeper of American Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum). A cultural anthropologist, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. from the University of New Mexico. Before coming to Penn she worked at the Indian Arts Research Center of the School of American Research in Santa Fe, and completed internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the School of American Research, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Penn Museum. Among her projects, she wrote the Guide to the Ethnographic Collections of the Penn Museum (2003), co-edited Native American Voices on Identity, Art and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem (2005), developed the online Louis Shotridge (Tlingit) Digital Archive (2011), and curated the ongoing Penn Museum exhibition, Native American Voices: The People -- Here and Now (2014-2021). Her research interests include issues surrounding indigenous identity, histories of collecting and representation, material culture, and textiles of the Americas.