Toni Gentilli

Toni Gentilli is an interdisciplinary artist, anthropologist, and curator with an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, an MA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Museum Studies from Arizona State University, and a BA with double majors in Anthropology and Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (magna cum laude). 

From 2016 through 2021, Toni served as the Residency Director at the Santa Fe Art Institute where she curated exhibitions and public programs engaging a variety of social and environmental justice issues in collaboration with creative practitioners and culture bearers from across the world. Before relocating to New Mexico, Toni spent six years in the San Francisco Bay Area working as an Independent Curator and Exhibition Preparator at a variety of university, municipal, and non-profit museums and galleries. Prior to that, Toni was an Archaeologist and Cultural Resources Project Director for an environmental planning firm in Phoenix, Arizona from 2000 to 2010. 

As the Curator of Exhibits at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Toni strives to build bridges across disciplines and communities through creative engagement with the diversity of human experience and expression. Her work is grounded in decolonial praxis, collaborative curation, and co-production of knowledge. Her areas of interest and expertise span material and visual culture studies, the anthropology of art, history of photography, the agency of objects/images, art and ecology, ethnobotany, animism, peoples’ relations with the more-than-human world, and cultural landscapes shaped by Indigenous science and traditional environmental knowledge.

Outside of the museum, Toni spends her time wildcrafting and cultivating botanical pigments, hydrosols, and incense; weaving, painting, making camera-less photographs; community land tending, and teaching youth about ethnobotany, ecology, and place-based art in the bosque along the middle Rio Grande.