Anya Montiel

Anya Montiel is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies department at Yale University. She received bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology and Native American Studies from the University of California at Davis. Montiel holds a master’s degree in Museum Studies from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA, where she wrote her thesis on Native American museums and cultural centers. She has worked in the museum field for more than ten years, including seven years at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Montiel assisted the curator of contemporary art with the NMAI inaugural contemporary art exhibition, Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser, and Continuum: 12 Artists for the museum’s New York location. Montiel has been a writer for the Smithsonian’s American Indian magazine since 2002 where she writes about contemporary Native American life and art. She contributed an essay on current issues in Native American art for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie.