Alexandra P. Alberda

ABOUT

Alexandra P. Alberda (she/her) is the first ever Curator of Indigenous Perspectives at Manchester Museum. She was appointed to take forward the innovative ‘Indigenising Manchester Museum’ programme, funded by the John Ellerman Foundation, which sets Indigenous perspectives at the heart of the museum. Previous to her role, she was a doctoral researcher and research illustrator at Bournemouth University. Her PhD, “Graphic Medicine Exhibited: Public Engagement with Comics in Curatorial Practice and Visitor Experience since 2010” (2021), explores the intersections of the comics medium, health, and exhibition to understand potential activist and community-based methodological approaches and sociocultural values of these experiences. Her collaborative projects have explored such topics as public health, health exhibitions, data storytelling and visualisation, comics, and creative-led knowledge exchange. As a research illustrator, she has worked on a number of projects, including a chapter in her graphic medicine thesis, two COVID-19 web comics, and The Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge 2020). She is currently the research illustrator for an AHRC funded COVID Comics research project led by Dr Anna Feigenbaum (Bournemouth University). 
During her Masters at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Alexandra was the graduate research assistant at the Great Plains Art Museum, part of the Centre for Great Plains Studies, where she was exhibition coordinator for Contemporary Indigeneity: The New Art of the Great Plains and worked with Johanna Sawyer on The Cinematic Framing of the West, which addressed misconceptions in depictions of Western and Native Peoples in art and film and the role museums play in reiterating these misconceptions in current socio-cultural understandings.
Beyond this, she has worked as an independent creative consultant on other curatorial projects and been an invited consultant to run a bespoke training on building relationships between Native American tribes and a public health organisation. She also spent a year teaching English in Phusang, Thailand, and has been an art instructor for over a decade. 

WEB COMICS & RESEARCH

The Social Dynamics of Post-Lockdown Life: A Webcomic, with Yazan Abbas and Anna Feigenbaum (2020)

Covid-19 Data Literacy is for Everyone, with Anna Feigenbaum and Aria Alamalhodaei (2020)

with Aria Alamalhodaei and Anna Feigenbaum, “Humanizing Data through ‘data Comics’: An Introduction to Graphic Medicine and Graphic Social Science” (2020)

research illustrator and contributor to: Anna Feigenbaum and Aria Alamalhodaei, The Data Storytelling Workbook (2020)

PhD thesis: “Graphic medicine exhibited: public engagement with comics in curatorial practice and visitor experience since 2010” (2021)

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