Judy Dow

Judy Dow is an educator, artist, scholar, and life-long learner of Wabanaki descent, whose work connects Indigenous knowledge, art, science, mathematics, and the natural world. For more than three decades, she has taught students of all ages through basketmaking, beadwork, mapping, storytelling, and hands-on explorations of land, culture, and traditional practices. Dow is the Executive Director of Gedakina, an Indigenous-led organization that works to strengthen Indigenous cultural knowledge, community, and education in New England. Through Gedakina and other community-based collaborations, she works to preserve and share Indigenous knowledge while creating opportunities for younger generations to engage with traditional practices and the land. Her artwork, teaching, and scholarship have been presented widely across the United States and Canada, including at the National Museum of the American Indian, the McCord Museum and Botanical Garden, and universities throughout New England and Europe.

Learning the Untold Stories of Your Town Through Art invites rural Vermont libraries and their communities to uncover and share the stories that make their towns unique. Beginning with Starksboro Public Library and Worthen Library, Dow will work with each community to explore topics of local interest through baskets, tapestries, demonstrations, storytelling, and hands-on artmaking. “Rural communities are full of stories that are rarely told,” says Dow. Community members will be invited to create their own works of art as a way of telling those stories, with each individual story contributing to a larger portrait of the community. The project is rooted in Dow’s belief that stories have value and that art can serve as a powerful way to preserve, share, and give meaning to the histories of the people and places that shape a community.