Meet our Platform Director!

Hello Curationist Community!

We are thrilled to introduce our platform director, Amanda Figueroa. We invite you to continue reading to learn about her passion for empowering our editorial team. She expands on how our editorial features stand as a pillar of Curationist, driving our commitment to cultural exploration and discovery, and reveals how Curationist is making an impact through our publications.

Happy Reading!

Meet Amanda Figueroa

Amanda Figueroa is the Platform Director at Curationist. She brings 12 years of experience in arts and culture, community engagement, and ethically sustainable strategy to the field of open access cultural heritage. She was raised at the U.S.-Mexico border and, after doctoral study at Harvard University, currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Interview with Amanda 

What role do editorial features play in advancing the mission of Curationist?

Editorial features are central to the mission of Curationist. Making cultural heritage accessible is more than just bringing together all these objects—we also have the mission to surface the stories that are told through these objects. Our archivists and writers take some of the most important and pressing narratives in these collections and help audiences discover something new. This storytelling is perhaps even more important than simply making sure all the objects are searchable in our platform—we build context to the art and artifacts by putting them into conversation with others.

How do you believe Curationist publications are making an impact in the exploration of representation and multicultural contexts within cultural curation?

We talk a lot at Curationist about knowledge parity. Through community-led archival and curatorial work, the stories and expertise of indigenous and original makers can receive the same level of attention and authority on their cultural objects as global-scale institutions. The editorial features and our other publications give writers and researchers the space to flesh out an idea or narrative with all the nuance it deserves. While metadata, even the metadata contributed by our archivists, is usually a factual representation of the object, these features can account for much more complication in the way an object was discovered, transported, displayed, and represented over time. We need both metadata and art writing to cover the whole life of an object.

In what ways can the insights from Curationist feature essays and collections inspire further dialogue and action within the community, both locally and globally?

We hope that each of our editorial features showcase a history or a point of view that people haven’t heard before, and that it adds to the overall knowledge of cultural heritage worldwide. The editorial features are essays designed to be read for pleasure or used in classrooms. Our aim is to complicate dominant narratives and round out the conversation around how we tell stories and talk about global issues with new perspectives that need to be heard.

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