Lillia McEnaney
Lillia McEnaney is a museum anthropologist, and independent curator, and assistant professor of museum studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Lillia’s current curatorial projects include collaborations with the School for Advanced Research’s Indian Arts Research Center, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation Museum. She is an adjunct instructor in Lehigh University's Department of Art, Architecture, and Design/Semester in the American West.
Previously, Lillia was assistant curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology and the Museum of International Folk Art, and director of the Hands-On Curatorial Program at the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts.
Lillia is the secretary of the Board of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, serves on the steering committee for the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s Friends of Indian Art, and sits on the Railyard Park Conservancy’s Public Art Committee. She holds an MA from New York University and a BA from Hamilton College.
SELECTED RECENT WORK:
—Nihinaaldlooshiidoo nídínééshgóó k’ee’ąą yilzhish dooleeł / Our Livestock Will Never Diminish: The Photography of Milton Snow and the Legacies of Livestock Reduction (1935-1959), exhibition project manager, Navajo Nation Museum, August 2025 | volume co-editor with Dr. Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné), University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming summer 2026
—ALL REZ: Kéyah, Hooghan, K'é, Iina I Land, Home, Kinship, Life, co-curator and project manager with lead curator and creative director Rapheal Begay (Diné), Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and Axle Contemporary, June 2024
—“Nothing Left for Me:” Federal Policy and the Photography of Milton Snow in Diné Bikéyah, co-curator with Dr. Jennifer Ne Denetdale (Diné), Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, May 2024 [Feature stories in Pasatiempo, NPR-KUNM, and The Santa Fe Reporter]
—”Virgil Ortiz: Historical Memory, Indigenous Futurisms, and the Art of Storytelling in 2180,” Southwest Contemporary, Fall 2024
—”To Weave for One Another: Wedge Weaving, Sheepherding, and Memory,” with Kevin Aspaas (Diné), in Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles, Museum of New Mexico Press, 2024