Cynthia Chavez Lamar

Overview

Cynthia Chavez Lamar is the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and she is the first Native woman to lead a Smithsonian museum. She is an enrolled member of San Felipe Pueblo in New Mexico. She began as an intern at the museum in 1994, then worked there as an associate curator and led the creation of Our Lives, one of the exhibitions that opened with the museum in Washington, D.C., in 2004. She went on to direct the Indian Arts Research Center in Santa Fe, then returned to the Smithsonian in 2014 to help care for the museum’s collection of more than a million objects and photographs, and she was named director in 2022. Today she oversees the museum’s three locations in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Maryland.

Why She Matters

Cynthia Chavez Lamar leads a museum that works with Native communities on how to care for and display their objects and histories. When she curated Our Lives, she worked with eight Native communities on how their stories would be told, showing that a curator’s job is not only to display objects but also to ask the people connected to them how they want their stories shared. Her path from museum intern to curator to director shows how varied a museum career can be, from caring for collections to leading a whole team. As the first Native woman to lead a Smithsonian museum, she shows that museum leaders can come from the communities whose stories museums hold.