Malinda Maynor Lowery

Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) was born in Robeson County, North Carolina and is an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research concerns Native American identity and politics in the late 19th and 20th centuries in North Carolina. She has published articles about migration and identity, school desegregation, and religious music in books and journals such as American Indian Culture and Research Journal (2005), Southern Cultures (2004), and Confounding the Color Line: Indian-Black Relations in a Multidisciplinary Perspective (2002). Lowery has produced three documentary films about Native American issues, including the award-winning In the Light of Reverence, which showed on PBS in 2001 to over three million people (http://www.sacredland.org) and in 2005 won the Henry Hampton Award for social change documentary from the Council on Foundations. Her two previous films, Real Indian and Sounds of Faith, both concern Lumbee identity and culture. They have been shown nationwide in classrooms, at conferences, and at film festivals including the 1997 and 1998 Sundance Film Festival. In 1997, Real Indian won the Best Short Documentary Award at the prestigious South by Southwest Film Festical in Austin, TX. Lowery has also been an adjunct professor in American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, a lecturer at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and a lecturer in the History Department at North Carolina State University. She serves as the President of the Board of Directors of the Carolina Arts Network, a non-profit organization headquartered in Robeson County that produces the outdoor drama, Strike at the Wind! She has a bachelor’s degree in History and Literature from Harvard University and a master’s degree in Documentary Film Production from Stanford.

Contact information: Malinda Maynor Lowery, History Department