Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Haidy Geismar is reader in anthropology at University College London, where she directs the Digital Anthropology program, part of the Material, Visual and Digital Culture research arm of the department and curates the UCL Ethnography Collections. She received her Ph.D. from University College London. With extensive research experience in museums in the Pacific, Europe, and North America, and with communities in Vanuatu and New Zealand, she has published widely on the museum history of anthropology and photography, material culture studies, intellectual and cultural property rights, indigenous arts movements, and digital museum initiatives. As well as teaching, research, and publishing, Dr. Geismar has curated several international exhibitions, most recently the Guantanamo Public Memory Project exhibition in London, and the exhibition Port Vila Mi Lavem Yu in Honolulu and New York. Her book, Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914, coauthored with curators in Cambridge and Vanuatu, was awarded the 2012 Collier Prize for Still Photography by the Society for Visual Anthropology. Her most recent book, Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property (Duke, 2013), compares indigenous appropriations of intellectual and cultural property in museum and art worlds in Vanuatu and New Zealand. She is the founder and editor of the popular anthropology weblog, www.materialworldblog.com, and current coeditor of the Journal of Material Culture. At Bard Graduate Center, she will continue investigating her current research project—a comparative study of the nature of digital objects in contexts as varied as Instagram, Maori-made 3D collections, and open source collections management systems.