Margaret A. Hardin

Dr. Hardin earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1977 and has been at the Natural History Museum since 1984. She was the lead curator for both the 2007-2008 exhibit, Treasures from the Vault — a selection of remarkable and rarely seen objects and specimens from the Museum’s collections — and the 2005 exhibit, Conversations — installations created by six contemporary Los Angeles artists in consultation with a curatorial team. She also curated the expansive Times Mirror Hall of Native American Cultures which opened in 1993; the permanent display Zuni Fetishes: Selections from the Boyd and Mary Evelyn Walker Collections; the reinstallation of Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985; and The Community’s Choice: Selections from the African Collections.

She is the author of Gifts of Mother Earth: Ceramics in the Zuni Tradition, a book and exhibit which traveled to the Heard Museum, Zuni, Arizona State University, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She has written numerous articles about the analysis of style in painted pottery decoration and won grants for wide-ranging topics of pueblo artistry and for educational programming of Native American traditions. With Nancy Parezo, she wrote “In the Realm of the Muses” for the Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest. She is currently a Research Associate at University of California, Los Angeles’ Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.