PEMBROKE – Nancy Strickland Fields, director and curator of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian at UNC Pembroke, has been elected to the Southeastern Museums Conference Board of Directors.

“I look forward to joining the SEMC Board to continue the import work they undertake while strengthening the representation of Native people in the southeast

through museum work,” Fields said.

Fields was elected during the Southeastern Museums Conference 2020 annual business meeting. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, the Southeastern Museums Conference is a networking organization that serves to foster professionalism, mutual support, and communication.

Fields’18-year museum career has been focused in museum education and administration. She has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City. She joined the Southeast Museum of the American Indian in January 2017.

She is the first Lumbee graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she earned a bachelor’s degree in museum studies. She earned a master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is currently a doctoral student in the public history program at North Carolina State University, as well as 2019 graduate of SEMC’s Jekyll Island Management Institute.

Her area of research focuses on southeastern Native peoples and the American colonial experience.

Fields is a member of the Lumbee Tribe. Her family resides in and around the Pembroke area. She was raised in Charlotte with very close ties to her family in Robeson County.