Brandie Macdonald

Biography

Brandie Macdonald (she/her) is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation with Choctaw Nation ancestry. Brandie’s work focuses on systemic change in museums through the implementation of anti-colonial and decolonial theory-in-practice internationally. She currently is the executive director and chief curator at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Previously she was the senior director of decolonizing initiatives at the Museum of Us in San Diego. In addition to her work at these museums, she is an active freelance consultant working to support decolonial change in non-profits, museums, education and Indigenous communities, internationally.

Brandie is also enrolled in a PhD program for education studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research, which aligns with her work as a practitioner, focuses on the sustainable application of decolonizing praxis in museums that enables transformative change and cross-cultural decolonial movement building. Her 14 years working in non-profits is based around capacity building through transformative policy, repatriation and education.

Prior to her work at the Museum of Us, she has worked in areas of economic capacity building with Indigenous communities domestically, built programs for intergenerational healing through culture-driven curriculum and poetry, and cultivated gender and racial equity initiatives in the bicycle industry.

She holds a MEd in international higher education from Loyola University, Chicago, and a BA in applied anthropology from University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Brandie is also a Salzburg Global Seminar fellow, an American Alliance of Museums’ Nancy Hanks Award for Professional Excellent recipient, a Smithsonian Affiliate fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian and a board member for the International Council of Museums (ICOM) Committee for Collecting (COMCOL) where she serves as the secretary, and sits on the editorial committee on the Journal of Museum education as a board member for the Museum Education Roundtable.