CURATION | ANTHROPOLOGY | ART HISTORY​
AMERICAS CURATOR AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Regional focus on North America
My main area of research is in Los Angeles, California, home to the largest demographic of urban Indigenous Peoples in the United States. Since 2017 I have focused on two primary research areas here.
My doctoral and continued professional research centres on contemporary Native North American artists who use visual practices to communicate their experiences as Native Peoples today and contribute to the reclamation, revitalisation, and re‑Indigenisation of their cultures and spaces. The artists I work with engage in wide-ranging artistic practices, including painting and works on paper, photography, installation, sculptural arts (including revitalisation of material culture) and performance encompassing traditional dance, on‑screen work, and theatre.
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I explore how Native artists negotiate identity and artistic agency, and navigate discourses of representation in Los Angeles as a Native place. My research examines how artists reflect contemporary Indigeneity within a sprawling and dynamic urban environment. In doing so, my research maps a Native North American artworld in Los Angeles, illustrating the diverse arenas of display, exhibition, and performance compared to other Indigenous and geographic art centres.
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This research is multidisciplinary, spanning Indigenous studies, art history and anthropological sub‑disciplines, including cultural and social anthropology, visual anthropology, anthropology of art and material culture, and museum anthropology, using museums and Indigenous engagements with them, as field sites.
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Through my role as Americas Curator at the British Museum, with a focus on the North America collection, I am currently expanding this work into a book, published by the British Museum Press.
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The project connects contemporary Native North American art and cultural belongings in Los Angeles with the Museum's collections. The book explores what I term microcosmic diasporas, examining how Native artists and communities engage with, reinterpret, reactivate and re‑Indigenise museum collections. The book is structured around Indigenous theories and concepts and my own theory of the aesthetic-return, which theorises the cyclicality and webs of implications of Indigenous art production and reception. Drawing on fieldwork, artist collaborations, and case studies, the book traces relational connections between historic collections and contemporary art practices, highlighting Indigenous voices, agency, and perspectives in both urban and museum spaces.
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Lost in Translation, Pamela J Peters (2016) British Museum collection 2024,2002.1
My second research focus in Los Angeles broadens to Native Californian history and lived experience today. I focus particularly on Native Californian basketry with a deep emphasis on Chumash basketry and history, including the Mission Systems and connecting 17th- and 18th-century Southern California museum collections with descendent communities.
This research has included collections-based and community research in Los Angeles and Southern California, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and at the British Museum, among other institutions in North America and Europe. More details can be found here
In my capacity as a Curator at the British Museum, I am honoured to work closely with Indigenous communities and steward their cultural belongings. My curatorial practice is grounded in collaboration and respect for Indigenous knowledge systems, including traditional ecological knowledge and perspectives and curatorial frameworks from Indigenous community museums.
I am particularly interested in the reactivation of historic collections through Indigenous presence and interventions at museums, and creating relational connections between collections, communities, and contemporary art practices that support co‑curation, foster dialogue and critique, and amplify Indigenous voices.
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Muscogee Creek Nation's Principal Chief David Hill and Second Chief of Duck Creek Ceremonial Ground Scott Stafford discussing finger weaving while visiting with cultural belongings at the British Museum
My most recent British Museum exhibition and display work has focused on Indigenous agency during the American War of Independence (scheduled British Museum Room 3, July 2026);
Inuit and Alaska Native artistry (Arctic Expressions, 2025 Kirkleatham Museum; 2027 Hull Maritime Museum, Lincoln Museum, the McManus: Dundee's Art Galley and Museum); and
Native North American footwear (permanent display, North America gallery British Museum).
You can find out more here
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Teaching about Arctic collections at a primary school
Traditional ecological/ ethnobotanical knowledge and collection histories:
From 2019-2022 I worked at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. I held three project positions working with the art, illustrations and economic botany collections and was involved in the Decolonising Kew working group.​
As a research Assistant within Kew’s Useful Plants and Fungi of Colombia project, (UPFC, an international project with the Humboldt Institute in Colombia) I researched Kew's Library, Art and Archives collection of Colombian orchids, ranging from botanical works on paper, botanical specimens, archival material including expedition journals. My research focus included traditional uses of orchids in Colombia, and botanical collector and artist histories.
The UPFC project aims to understand Colombia’s useful plants and fungi to improve people’s livelihoods, reducing inequality and gender gap by boosting its bioeconomy through the sustainable use of its biodiversity.
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Orchidaceae Cattleya Rex. Kew Gardens, LAA.
Indigenous rights and environmental resource extraction:
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For my Masters thesis I researched the Penan, an Indigenous hunter-gatherer community living in the interior of Sarawak rainforest in the Malaysian part of Borneo. I conducted in depth library-based and interview-based research surrounding the deforestation of the rainforest as a result of palm oil plantations, hydro-electric dams and logging. My research shows how the changes to the Penan’s environment as a result of resource extraction affects key aspects of their social structure, including hierarchies and egalitarianism, gender relations and work labour, health, human and Indigenous rights violations. The implications determine that logging, palm oil and hydroelectric dams are disastrous for the Penan and signal the end of self-sufficiency in the forest. The Penan’s social, cultural and traditional ways of life are challenged as a result of reduced access to the forest and its resources, pressure to become Malay, and to discard their traditional customs and beliefs. (This research was conducted between 2014 and 2015 and is thus based on that time-frame and so could now be somewhat outdated.)
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The Unwanted Gift. The Effect of Palm Oil Plantations and Subsequent ‘Development’ of the Penan of Sarawak MSc thesis.
Research question: How have development projects such as deforestation, palm oil plantations, and the building of hydroelectric dams affected the social, cultural, and traditional way of life for the Penan of Sarawak, and the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia?
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Women’s empowerment and women’s rights:
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I actively educate myself in this area, and an example of my structured research on this topic was in 2013-2014. Alongside literary research I spent a month at a women’s economic empowerment centre, the Living Positive Kenya Centre in Ngong, Kenya. The Centre's Women’s Economic Empowerment Programme (WEEP) provides 18-month training cycles for women in the community who are victims of domestic violence and have HIV/AIDS. The training includes general social care and health education, vocational skills training and training in micro-finance. Through participant observation at the Centre and numerous interviews with the women, staff, community members and local government officials, my research examined the extent to which WEEP and similar programmes help to empower women in such circumstances.
You can read more about this here
N.b. This research was conducted and written between 2013 and 2014 and so may now be out of date.