December 2010
 Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) is an Assistant Professor of art history and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on Native American film, fine arts, visual representations and museum theory. Mithlo is a prolific scholar and curator, exploring the manner in which film, photography and media, as well as arts and material culture, are used to both produce and define ways of understanding. In her book “Our Indian Princess”: Subverting the Stereotype (School for American Research: 2009), Mithlo explores how stereotypes can be undermined by being appropriated. For her work she has received much recognition, including recent research fellowships from her university and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Currently Mithlo is the director of the Poolaw Photography Project, a joint undertaking of the University of Madison-Wisconsin and The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, concerned with the work and legacy of 20th-century Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw. Her curatorial work has resulted in five exhibits at the Venice Biennale. From 1997-2003 she served on the Board of the IA3/Indigenous American Arts Alliance which effectively opened the door to exhibition of contemporary Native Arts during the Biennale. She is currently at work on a book about the emergence of the indigenous arts presence at the Venice Biennale from 1999 to 2009.
Mithlo earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University, writing on Native American identity and arts commerce in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a board member of the Society for Visual Anthropology and a contributor to SVA’s annual film festival. Her most recent article “‘Can You Hear Me?’ Silence as an Indigenous Representational Strategy in Film” is included in the upcoming Indigenous Voice in Film (University of Nebraska Press).
Image credit: Nancy Marie Mithlo - photograph by Stephen Lang
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