Brandie Macdonald

Brandie Macdonald is the Director of Decolonizing Initiatives at San Diego Museum of Man. Her work aligns with her passion of developing pathways for museums to apply decolonial methodology, which focuses on dismantling colonial legacy, structural racism, and inequitable practices. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, with ancestral ties to the Choctaw Nation. Her non-profit career is based around capacity building through transformative education, which is rooted in open-ended and experiential pedagogies. Prior to her work at the Museum of Man, Brandie led the First Peoples Fund’s arts and economic capacity building initiatives on Indigenous reservations nationally. She managed their professional development trainings for Native artists and other organization programs. Additionally, she was the founder of their Indigenous Youth Leadership Initiative, called Dances with Words – a spoken word program on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation which focuses on Indigenous inter-generational healing through oral tradition. Brandie is an Education Studies doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego, where her research focuses on the praxis of decolonization within informal learning spaces, specifically museums. She was a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, a Diversity Fellow for the American Alliance of Museums and a Smithsonian Affiliate Fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian.