Jill Forshee
Jill Forshee holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley and has worked in the Indonesian archipelago for over twenty years. Her research interests include visual arts, life histories, gender, animism, global forces, and causes and effects of violence. In 2009, she spent a year in Indonesia, funded by a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Award. She is author of two books: Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives, and Travels from Sumba (2001) and Cultures and Customs of Indonesia (2006); and co-editor of Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia (1999). In 2012, Forshee received a three-year appointment as a consultant to the Fulbright Program for Indonesia. Recently, she contributed a chapter about Sumba to Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia (2012), an exhibition catalog for the Fowler Museum at UCLA, for which she also co-authored a chapter about East Timor with Roy Hamilton. Between 2008 and 2010, Jill and Roy Hamilton made research trips to Sumba Island and East Timor, where they helped create two videos that became part of the DVD accompanying the Weavers’ Stories museum exhibit and catalog. Currently, she is collaborating with Hamilton again on a museum exhibition and book focused solely upon Timor Island, to appear in 2014. She teaches cultural anthropology at Columbia College Chicago.