Public Lecture: Porchia Moore

Dr. Porchia Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) and an Associate Professor and Rotating Program Head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. She also serves as Co-Director of the Incluseum, an international cultural heritage collaboratory. Her writing and research are widely used for training and education in museums across the United States.

She is the co-creator of The Visitors of Color project; a national counternarrative project recognized by the American Alliance of Museums as a resource that seeks to highlight and share the lived experiences, insights, and reflections on modern museums from marginalized citizens. Her writing interrogates the cultural heritage of the Black Atlantic and the Deep South and the intersections of technology, cultural heritage, and community and emphasizes the need for cultural heritage institutions to center 21^st century literacies.

Moore received her Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in the School of Library and Information Science and the McKissick Museum Management program. The recipient of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership Librarian fellowship, she is a museum visionary and activist-scholar who researches suppressed narratives museums and other cultural heritage spaces. Her research examines the intersections of race, community, technology, and social media, and inclusion in museums.

She co-curated the exhibition, From Shadow to Substance, which was named one of the top ten university museum exhibitions by Forbes magazine. She has been a featured guest on national media outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR)’s Here and Now.

She has served as an advisor to numerous national museum projects including MASS (Museums as Site for Social) Action with the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Museums and Race. She served as consulting curator at the Columbia Museum of Art and curated the rotating African American art gallery, Spoken.

Dr. Moore has served on numerous boards, such as Friends of African American Art and Culture at the Columbia Museum of Art (where she served as the first-ever Inclusion Catalyst), Museum Education Roundtable, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, in addition to serving on a multitude of advisory and planning committees including the South Carolina Federation of Museums, Museum Computer Network, and more.

She is a prominent speaker and featured keynote at international and national conferences across the GLAMr (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, repositories) as a recognized expert on issues of race, inclusion, and social justice in cultural heritage institutions. She is a prolific author and writer with several published essays, book chapters, and multiple works-in-progress and forthcoming books. Her most recent book, Transforming Inclusion in Museums: The Power of Collaborative Inquiry is published by Rowman & Littlefield.