Elise Boulanger (Citizen of the Osage Nation)
Elise Boulanger, a citizen of the Osage Nation, specializes in collaborative, community-centric projects that place contemporary Indigenous artistic practices and expressions at the forefront. As an emerging curator and artist from Bentonville, Arkansas—located in the Osage Nation’s ancestral territory—Boulanger's interdisciplinary research approach springs from her efforts to intertwine knowledge from historic Indigenous-made works in museum collections with current revitalization networks of Indigenous lifeways and languages. Boulanger is currently pursuing graduate work in the University of Arkansas’s Art History in Arts of the Americas program.
Boulanger earned a BA in Studio Art from Fort Lewis College in 2021, where she became the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Center of Southwest Studies Museum. From 2020 to 2023, Boulanger organized and installed five community-driven exhibitions centered around Indigenous identity and representation. Boulanger’s 2022 exhibition As Seeds, We Grow: Student Reflections on Resilience brought together a multigenerational group of twenty Native contributors to explore cultural vitality in response to public reconciliation efforts of the college's federal Indian boarding school history.
In 2023, Boulanger joined Baltimore Museum of Art as the Curatorial Research Assistant for the Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum initiative, a series of 9 exhibitions and museum-wide interventions centering the voices of Native artists and community members. Boulanger also holds a certificate in Business & Entrepreneurship from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and currently attends Osage language classes through the Osage Nation Language Department.
Panel: Land Return as an Artistic Endeavor
Workshop: Beading with Elise Boulanger