First American Art Magazine No. 6, Spring 2015 | Page 10

Contributing Writers
ROSEMARY DIAZ (Santa Clara Pueblo) is a freelance

writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has been
widely published over the last 20 years, appearing in such
periodicals as Beadwork, Collector’s Guide, Native Peoples, New
Mexico Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, and Santa Fean. She
writes an original, online series, Native Foodways: New Seasons
for Indian Country Today Media Network.

JOSEPH ERB (Cherokee Nation) is a computer animator,

film producer, educator, language technologist, and artist.
He earned his MFA degree in sculpture from the University
of Pennsylvania. Erb created the first computer animation
in the Cherokee language, The Beginning They Told. He has
taught Muscogee Creek and Cherokee students how to
animate traditional stories. Erb works for the Cherokee Nation
Education Service in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

SUZANNE NEWMAN FRICKE, PhD (Ashkenazic-

American), wrote her dissertation in art history on 20thcentury Native American pottery at the University of New
Mexico. She teaches art history at the Santa Fe University of
Art and Design. In 2012, along with Beverly Morris (Aleut)
and Charlie James, Fricke co-curated the exhibit Octopus
Dreams: Works on Paper by Contemporary Native American Artists,
which traveled to six sites in Russia and to 516 ARTS in
Albuquerq ue. In 2014, two museums in Russia displayed
another show, As We See It: Photography by Contemporary Native
American Artists, curated by Dr. Fricke and India Young, who
are preparing an accompanying catalogue. She is currently
organizing a third show, which will also travel to Russia.

REID GÓMEZ, PhD (Navajo Nation), is the Mellon

Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Kalamazoo
College. She is currently working on The Navajo Slave
Project and finishing her fourth novel. Her work addresses
extermination and slavery in the borderlands and bloodlands
and language revitalization.

LOUIS GRAY (Osage Nation) is the former coordinator

of the Primary Residential Treatment Center in the Osage
Nation. From 2002 to 2014, he managed Native American
Times, a weekly newspaper. Gray has won numerous awards,
including the Charles Chibitty Community Service Award,
as an individual (2002) and as a member of family (2003); the
Williams Companies Diversity Award (2004); Best Straight
Dancer in Indian Country (2001), and Best Editorial from the
Oklahoma Press Association (1991).

SCOTT W. HALE is an adviser and accredited art appraiser
for Native American Art Appraisals, Inc., with offices in Los
Angeles, Santa Fe, Tulsa, and New York City. He pursued his
master’s and doctoral studies at the University of Oklahoma,
where he taught in the Native American Studies program and
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W W W.F IR S TAM ER I C AN ARTMAG A ZI N E.C OM

lectured in the School of Art and Art History. Hale is a former
curator of private, corporate, and nonprofit art collections and
has written and lectured for several publications and museums.

ANNA HOOVER (Unangax̂) earned both her master

of arts degree in Native American art history and master
of communications degree in Indigenous documentary
filmmaking from the University of Washington. She is
an artist, curator, filmmaker, educator, and community
organizer, based in Anchorage, Alaska. Hoover is the
daughter of the widely respected late sculptor John Hoover.

KATJA LEHMANN, PhD (German), is a curator,

writer, archaeologist, and collector of contemporary Native
American art, including Hopi katsinam. She earned her
doctoral degree in Egyptology, classics, and European
prehistory from Ruprechts-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in
2001 and had multiple museum internships at the Staatliches
Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Munich; Rem Reiss-EngelhornMuseen, Mannheim, and the Egyptian Department of the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Lehmann served as curator and
collections manager at Mitchell Museum of the American
Indian in Evanston, Illinois (2006–2008), and editor-atlarge for CNAM Magazine (2013–2014). Beginning in
2009, Lehmann has traveled the world as a Lean Six Sigma
Consultant of the Global Marketing Team for the Women’s
Health and Cancer Division of Becton Dickinson.

HEIDI McKINNON is the executive director of Curators
Without Borders, a nonprofit that designs exhibitions and
educational programming for international development
projects and underserved communities in conjunction
with museum partners, government agencies, and NGO
partners. She concurrently serves as director of exhibitions
and community programs at the Sandy Spring Museum
in Maryland. McKinnon’s career focuses on historical
memory, human rights, and Indigenous communities in the
Americas, to which she brings over a decade of experience
in developing collaborative museum exhibitions, at the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American
Indian, at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage, and independently.

MELISSA MELERO (Fallon Paiute-Modoc) is a mixed

media artist living in Hungry Valley, Nevada. She is currently
a full-time artist and co-founder of the art group Great Basin
Native Artists in Reno, Nevada. Melero has a bachelor of fine
arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a
bachelor of science degree from Portland State University in
Oregon. She exhibits her art throughout the United States.

MARY ELLEN MEREDITH (Cherokee Nation) owns

Meredith Interests and Noksi Press, a Cherokee-language
publishing company based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She