Tressa Berman  (United States)

Tressa Berman is an interdisciplinary scholar (PhD UCLA), independent curator, author and arts administrator. She is Founding Director of BorderZone Arts, a social profit (non-profit) community-based, international arts organziation based in San Francisco.

Tressa is former faculty at Arizona State University and more recently has held the following positions: Visiting Faculty, San Francisco Art Institute, Scholar-in-Residence, Women’s Leadership Institute, Mills College, and Research Associate, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. Her work with Indigenous artists has involved her with many communities and institutions, including UNESCO, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hopi Tribe and the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota. In addition to numerous academic publications, she has written for Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Cultural Survival Quarterly,and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts. Her second book is ‘No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession’.

Marie Bouchard  (Canada)

Marie Bouchard was born and raised in southern Manitoba and is of Métis descent. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and a Masters Degree in Canadian Social History. From 1986 to 1997 she lived in the central Arctic where she worked with the residents of Baker Lake, Nunavut, to develop and promote their art and culture. In 1997 she returned to Winnipeg, Manitoba and worked as an independent art advisor/art historian specializing in inter-cultural and multi-disciplinary contemporary art. Two major exhibitions curated during this period were An Inuit Perspective: Baker Lake Sculpture organized by The Art Gallery of Ontario in collaboration with Itsarnittakarvik: The Baker Lake Inuit Heritage Centre; and a solo retrospective of the works on cloth of Baker Lake artist Marion Tuu’luq organized by the National Gallery of Canada (currently on tour). In November, 2001, Marie Bouchard was appointed Executive Director of the St. Norbert Arts Centre, Winnipeg, MB. She returned to freelance curating in February 2003 and is currently working with francophone, metis, and aboriginal artists in Canada.

Jennifer Herd  (Australia)

"Jennifer Herd, (DipTeach, CertDesign, MofVisArts) is an Aboriginal person who is a descendant of the Mbarbaram people of the Atherton Tablelands region of far North Queensland. Ms Herd is currently Lecturer at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art where she helped establish the Bachelor of Visual Arts in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Arts (BoVA.CAIA), the first degree program of its kind in Australia.

As Curator, she coordinated and facilitated an Indigenous
Australian Copyright Arts Industry Forum and the exhibition, "Telling Tales," which featured Indigenous arts centered on the theme of copyright. She helped organize the "Papunya Project," a partnership project with Griffith University and Fireworks Art Gallery at King George Square, which involved a sandpainting installation in the heart of Brisbane. As artist, teacher and curator she has run numerous workshops, exhibitions and has worked as costume and set designer and painter. Most recently she co-curated a Queensland Indigenous artists exhibition titled “Out of Country” for the Australian Emabassy in Washington D.C. She was also the winner of the 2003 Thiess Art Prize.”

Colleen Cutschall  (Canada)

Professor Colleen Cutschall (Lakota) is currently at Brandon University, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, where she recently established a BFA including Aboriginal Art as a major and minor. She is a recognized painter exploring Lakota creation, myth, ritual, sacred time and space while simulating Lakota women's bead and quill work styles. Her work expanded into installation pieces, such as Sister Wolf in her Moon and House Made of Stars locating conjunctions of sacred place with ritual and archeoastronomy. This play on place includes historical and political themes in Cutschall's recent works such as her bronze sculptural installation, the Spirit Warriors, as part of the new Indian memorial at the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument and historic site.