Sháńdíín Brown

Sháńdíín Brown is a PhD student, curator, creative, and citizen of the Navajo Nation from Arizona. Her research focuses on multitemporal Native American art and fashion, with an emphasis on its connections to global Indigenous contemporary art, Indigenous feminism, and Indigenous futurism. She is a Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow at Yale, a university-wide fellowship that offers additional funding and research support for early-stage PhD students.

She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where she earned her BA cum laude in Anthropology and Native American Studies and minored in Environmental Studies. Previously, she held positions at the Heard Museum, Penn Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), School for Advanced Research (SAR) Indian Arts Research Center (IARC), and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum.

At the Hood Museum, she co-curated Unbroken: Native American Ceramics, Sculpture, and Design (2022–2023), which investigated themes of continuity, innovation, and Indigenous knowledges across time and mediums. At the RISD Museum, she was the first Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art and was later promoted to the museum’s first Assistant Curator of Native American Art. There, she co-curated Being and Believing in the Natural World: Perspectives from the Ancient Mediterranean, Asia, and Indigenous North America (2022–2023) and Take Care (2022–2023). She also curated Diné Textiles: Nizhónígo Hadadít’eh (2023–2024), which examined the intersections of historic and contemporary Diné apparel design, weaving, and womanhood. She co-taught in RISD’s Apparel Design department and served as a recurring critic.

In 2025, she curated Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time, a New York Times Critic’s Pick at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. Featuring twenty-two Indigenous artists working across the last six decades, the exhibition examined how Native conceptions of cyclical time and embodied memory shape contemporary artistic practice.

Sháńdíín’s writing has been published in Fashion Studies, an open-access academic journal from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Fashion & Systemic Change, and Forging, a digital-first journal for critically imagining Native futures by Forge Project. She writes regularly for First American Art Magazine and Hyperallergic.

She is the 2023–2025 secretary for the Native American Art Studies Association (NAASA) and a curatorial consultant for the Gochman Family Collection. Her jewelry practice can be viewed on Instagram at @T.Begay.Designs.