Aaron Glass, PhD
Professor
Bard Graduate Center:
Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
38 West 86th Street, New York, NY 10024
Phone: 212 501 3068
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Aaron Glass is an anthropologist and visual artist working primarily with Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations in British Columbia, Canada. His doctoral dissertation, along with a companion film “In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting" (www.der.org), examines the ethnographic representation and performance history of the Hamat’sa or “Cannibal Dance.” Glass has published articles on various aspects of First Nations art and performance on the Northwest Coast, and is the co-author, with Aldona Jonaitis, of the forthcoming book, The Totem Pole: An Intercultural Biography (University of Washington Press). He is presently collaborating with the U’mista Cultural Centre to create a digital database to document the Kwakwaka’wakw collection in the Ethnological Museum Berlin.  From 2006-2008, Glass was a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department at the University of British Columbia.

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Brad Evans, PhD
Professor
Department of English
Rutgers University
510 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA
Phone: 732 932 7674
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Brad Evans is a literary critic specializing in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American culture. His research has focused on the historical relationship between art and ethnography, and his essays on this topic have appeared in Visual Anthropology, American Quarterly, ELH, and Criticism.  In his book, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), Evans asks the question how artists, authors and social scientists understood and produced notions of social difference in a period before the anthropological notion of culture existed in the English language.  In addition to ongoing work on the history of anthropology and cultural theory, he is also the author of Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (Johns Hopkins, 2019), a history of the avant-garde in American literature that takes as its jumping off point the short-lived vogue for “little magazines” published in the U.S., Paris and Japan in the 1890s.

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Andrea Sanborn
Former Executive Director
U'mista Cultural Centre
Box 253
Alert Bay, BC V0N 1A0 Canada
Phone: 250 974 5403
Fax: 250 974 5499
Website: http://www.umista.org/

Pudłas (traditional name of Andrea Sanborn), of the 'Ma'amtagila, is a member of the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations. As Executive Director of the U'mista Cultural Centre since 2002, she is directed by their mandate to ensure the survival of all aspects of the cultural heritage of the Kwakwakawakw. In the past decade, she has been the lead project manager on a number of significant developments, including the creation of a replica Kwakwaka'wakw village in the Netherlands, the rebuilding of the Alert Bay ceremonial Big House following its destruction by arson, and the expansion of the U'mista Cultural Centre itself. In addition, she has long facilitated the distribution of Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations arts and crafts around the world. More recently, Sanborn acted as the Primary Negotiator for the repatriation of a transformation mask from the British Museum (which is now exhibited at the U'mista Cultural Centre on a long term loan), and she was invited to speak on a panel at the 2008 Athens International Conference on the Return of Cultural Objects to Their Countries of Origin.

[Andrea passed away in the summer of 2010 after the public event project wrapped up. The project could not have been completed without her tireless dedication to Kwakwaka'wakw culture. She is sadly missed.]