Plains Indian Museum staff
Meet the staff of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Assistant Curator Hunter Old Elk
Gordon Ambrosino
Curator, Plains Indian Museum
Dr. Gordon Ambrosino joined the Plains Indian Museum as curator in September 2022.
He earned his PhD in Anthropology in 2017 from La Universidad de los Andes Bogotá, Colombia. Following his studies, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Art of the Ancient Americas Department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He comes to the @plainsindianmuseum from the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He served as NAGPRA Coordinator and is currently an Adjunct Professor.
Gordon is a landscape anthropologist whose research draws from ethnology, archaeology, art history, anthropology of art, and semiotics to elucidate the interrelations between people, objects, and land. His past and current repatriation consultations inform his research focus and interests. He has directed several long-term repatriation projects from several regions in North America, including the Arctic, the Northwest Coast, the Plains, and the Southwest. He has also helped direct international repatriations, primarily in Mesoamerica. These repatriation consultations laid the foundation for his doctoral research on a large rock art complex in the highland central Andes. He developed a typology that tracked changes in image types, locational contexts, and production techniques over 4,000 years.
Drawing from these experiences, Gordon is currently co-curating an exhibition that focuses on the Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, a culturally plural landscape that has been at the center of recent debates in public land management and use. This collaborative project between the LACMA, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Bears-Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is slated to open in early 2025.
Hunter Old Elk
Assistant Curator, Plains Indian Museum
Hunter Old Elk is a member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) and Yakama Nations. She grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana. Old Elk earned a bachelor’s degree in Art with a focus on Native American history at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.
As Assistant Curator for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s Plains Indian Museum, Old Elk uses museum engagement through object curation, exhibition development, social media, and education to explore the complexities of historic and contemporary Plains Indian culture. She is especially inspired by the lives of Native women who lived and thrived on the Plains.
