Teresa Montoya

Teresa Montoya (Diné) is aa Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her current manuscript project, Permeable: Diné Politics of Extraction and Exposure, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental toxicity as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Based on over 15 months of ethnographic research on the Navajo Nation, her research engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the entanglements of checkerboard allotment, tribal jurisdiction, and regulatory failure among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico. Themes of environmental contamination and settler colonialism interrogated in her writing are central to her ongoing media work in the mediums of photography and filmmaking. A curated selection of images from her current photographic projects are shared on her website (see link above). She is Diné and a citizen of the Navajo Nation.