Ashley Minner Profiled in Smithsonian Folklife Magazine

The Smithsonian Magazine featured folklorist Ashley Minner in a recent Q&A highlighting her career and her new position as an assistant curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Minner is and the institution’s first curator from the Lumbee tribe.

“In the process of earning my doctoral degree, I was hired by the Maryland State Arts Council to work as a folklorist and guest lecturer in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I got to work with all kinds of amazing artists and culture bearers throughout the state but of course specialized in working with American Indian people and teaching American Indian studies. Eventually, UMBC created a full-time position for me, and I became a professor of the practice and the inaugural director of their new minor in public humanities, which was pretty cool,” Minner told the magazine.