Member
I’m a PhD student in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU, and currently direct the activities of the Bill Reid Centre for Northwest Coast Studies at SFU. My research interests include Indigenous cultural heritage, digital heritage, and visual culture. My background is in sociocultural anthropology and I completed my Masters degree in that discipline at Carleton University in 2008. My M.A. thesis project examined the disjuncture between ecotourism principles and practice in the Mesoamerican country of Belize. After my MA, I worked as a junior consultant for Ascentum Inc. in Ottawa, ON., where I participated in numerous in-person and online stakeholder consultations for various levels of government. In the fall of 2009 I moved to Vancouver to pursue a career with the Bill Reid Centre, where I became very familiar with the photographic and ethnographic record of Coastal First Nations in British Columbia and Alaska. In my time with the Centre, I have been involved in numerous Northwest Coast art and cultural heritage projects that draw on the visual histories of the coast—captured in photographs, paintings, and sketches—and the work of contemporary Northwest Coast artists.