María Montenegro

Information Studies – UCLA

María Montenegro is a doctoral candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of critical archival theory, Indigenous studies, and tribal law and policy, and is in conversation with anticolonial theory and the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. Her dissertation project explores the role that archives play structurally in the U.S. Federal Acknowledgement Process. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University and a BA in Aesthetics from Universidad Catolica (Chile).

She has published articles in Archival Science, the Journal of Documentation, and the Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Studies, and a co-authored chapter with Dr. Jane Anderson in the Routledge Companion to Cultural Property. María is a recipient of a 2020-2021 UC Critical Mission Studies grant, a 2021 Huntington Library Research Fellowship, and an awardee of the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research. She is the digital archivist of UCLA’s repatriation program Carrying our Ancestors Home (COAH), part of a UC Multicampus Research Program titled “Gifting Knowledge: Centering Tribal Stories of Cultural Preservation in Difficult Times,” and a consultant for Chile’s Ministry of Arts and Cultures’ Department of Indigenous Peoples’ cultural revitalization program. She has worked as the graduate researcher for the Special Advisor to the UCLA Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs, as the project coordinator of the Sustainable Heritage Network, and as researcher for Local Contexts.