Tressa Berman
Dr. Tressa Berman is a cultural anthropologist who works in the art world. As a curator, author and educator her work stands at the intersections of community and creativity. As a visual ethnographer, her work is informed by more than 40 years of living in and working with Indigenous communities and contemporary global art world contexts, including as former program director for the International Conference on the Arts in Society. She has curated exhibitions from California to New York and Sydney, while her passion for community-centered projects drives her approach to visual culture—working with libraries, storefronts and nonprofit spaces.
An anthropoeta, she has shared stories from the hood of a car in rural North Dakota to the desert campfires of central Australia, and urban art studios around the world. Her work with image-based story is most evident in current works: Postcards from Indian Country, USA and her work-in-progress: My Life as Faye: Through the Lens of a Partisan Woman, inspired by a series of documentary photographs of life inside Nazi resistance camps of WWII. Author of two previous books and many journal and art magazine essays, she has received recognitions and research awards including: a Judy Chicago Art Education Award, a Mellon Fellowship for Indigenous Digital Knowledge Sharing, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the National Museum of Folklife and Cultural Heritage (Smithsonian Institution), and numerous scholarly and creative residency awards, including a Social Justice Scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, Massachusetts). As a poet, she is often inspired by the Image—whether a photograph, painting or an archival remnant—and has published in anthologies, literary journals and as a member of the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective. In addition to her teaching and mentoring work, Tressa brings deep studies in contemplative practices, bringing conscious leadership to her work as Founder and Principal Consultant of the Institute for Inter-Cultural Practice.