Profiles of 2020-2021 CRS/CSWR Fellows
Zonnie Gorman
Zonnie Gorman is a PhD candidate in History with a graduate minor in Museum Studies. Her areas of interest include indigenous masculinities, 20th century war, and memory and commemoration. As the daughter of a Navajo Code Talker, their story is of particular interest. A public historian for nearly thirty years, she has lectured professionally throughout the United States and Canada. She curated two exhibits on the Navajo Code Talkers, one in 2001, and most recently, served on the curatorial team as an SME for the expansion of the Navajo Code Talker display at the National Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, VA. As a graduate student, she presented at several history and archivist conferences. She was a 2013 NARA Regional Residency fellow, and in 2018, a participant in the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies Workshop in Research Methods. She currently holds a CRS/CSWR Assistantship to work on two Navajo Code Talker collections.
Breanna Reiss
Breanna Reiss is a PhD student in the Department of Art at UNM. She is an art historian who studies pre-Hispanic ceramics, primarily in coastal Ecuador and Peru, with a focus on their iconography and elements of their composition. She also received her M.A. from UNM where in partnership with the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, she examined the chemical composition of rare blue and blue-green post-fire ceramic figurine colorants from Ecuador. Her dissertation explores the intersections between ancient Moche semasiographic plant motifs and the ethnobotanical uses of these identifiable plant species. Alongside with teaching introductory art history courses, she is the Center for Southwest Research Pictorial Fellow. At CSWR, Breanna has processed several photographic collections focused on pre-Columbian and Native American art and artifacts as well as collections focused on historical topics like the Mexican Revolution.
