Royal BC Museum welcomes a new Curator of Art and Images

VICTORIA, BC– This week the Royal BC Museum welcomed Dr. India Rael Young into the role of Curator of Art and Images. 

Dr. Young, an art historian and curator, specializes in media arts and North American Indigenous arts. She joins the museum and archives from the Princeton University Art Museum, where she was the Andrew W. Mellon Research Specialist in Native American Art. 

Before Princeton she was at the University of New Mexico, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2017. 

As a specialist in media arts, Dr. Young is well equipped to take on the curatorship of the Royal BC Museum’s extensive photography collection, in addition to curatorial duties in the prints, drawings and paintings collection. 

She hopes to help expand understandings of art by building relationships between the Royal BC Museum collections, members of its various departments and the regional communities. Dr. Young’s upcoming projects will focus on inclusive histories of British Columbia and significant British Columbian photographers.

Young is currently working on the publication of her dissertation on the history of Northwest Coast Native and First Nations prints, scholarly articles on decolonizing actions within museums and an exhibition on collaborations in the arts. 

Dr. Young traces Canadian and American art histories through feminist, decolonial, and critical race frameworks. Her independent curatorship has brought exhibitions of photography and Indigenous arts to museums and art spaces in Canada, the United States, and Russia. 

Along with public and university lectures, she occasionally writes for arts publications, including BlackFlash, Canadian Art and First American Art on topics ranging from works on paper to new media.