Symposium Organizers

Dr. Alexandra Peck serves as Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art & Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art, & Theory. As an anthropologist, her work emphasizes historical Northwest Coast Native art, traditional ecological knowledge, land use and placemaking, and heritage/cultural preservation. She focuses specifically on Coast Salish material culture, integrating archaeological and museum collections into her research. Her scholarship examines various topics ranging from Coast Salish wooly dogs and mycological textiles, to mortuary traditions and Indigenous cartography, to modern totem poles and Haida argillite.  

She is co-editor of the journal, Archaeology in Washington, as well as the author of numerous articles in publications such as the Journal of Northwest Anthropology, Journal of American History, Texte zur Kunst, and books including Human-Plant Entanglement: Thinking with Plants in the Anthropocene (Brill). Her work has been funded by institutes such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund via the Reed Foundation, the Audain Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Previously, she served as Visiting Scholar of Indigenous Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities' Institute for Advanced Study, upon receiving her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown University.

Peck has conducted NAGPRA inventories for museums such as Smith College Museum of Art & the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, as well as assisted with Indigenous repatriation claims in the United States and Canada. Currently, she is creating a digital repository of ancient Coast Salish stone sculpture, in an effort to reconnect these 4,000 year old pieces with their descendant communities and raise awareness of precolonial art forms. 

At UBC, Dr. Peck teaches courses that combine anthropology, archaeology, and art history, and organizes the Audain Symposium. 

You can learn more about her work here or here. 

Audrey Chan is a Master of Arts candidate in Art History in the Indigenous Arts of the Americas degree program at the University of British Columbia. Her research interrogates Indigenous and settler narratives in American and Canadian national galleries. Her research focuses on wampum as method, drawing upon the treaty principles of the Haudenosaunee Two Row Wampum as a guide for anti-colonial museum practice.

Chan has garnered experience working in major museums within the United States. She served as a curatorial intern for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map—the institution’s first major retrospective of a Native American artist. She also held the Warshawsky Fellowship in Interpretation at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Her academic background spans art history, anthropology, and museum studies. She earned her B.A. from Colgate University, where she worked as a curatorial assistant for both the Longyear Museum of Anthropology and the Picker Art Gallery. 

At UBC, Chan served as a committee member and curator for the 47th Annual Art History, Visual Art and Theory Graduate Symposium and exhibition, Entangled Embodiment: Intersections & Dialogues. Chan is an Exhibitions and Public Programs Assistant at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery where she leads Decolonization Tours that feature works of Indigenous outdoor art that disrupt the settler-colonial position of UBC on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory.