The Department of Anthropology is happy to introduce Bridge to the Doctorate Fellow Tia Folgheraiter.

The Bridge to the Doctorate Program is an initiative from the Graduate School or Arts and Sciences at UVA. It was developed out of a deep commitment to diversifying UVA’s graduate programs, the professoriate and the research workforce. It seeks to support post-baccalaureate students from groups that are underrepresented in their disciplines and who have not had sufficient training and research experiences to prepare them for admission to doctoral programs.

The Program provides two full years of fellowship support for students to enroll in a combination of courses, supervised research, and UVA’s intensive graduate student professional development curriculum known as “PhD Plus.” Throughout the entirety of the program, fellows work in close collaboration with a faculty mentor. Tia’s mentor is Dr. Kasey Jernigan.

Tia Folgheraiter is a Bridge to the Doctorate Fellow and is currently enrolled in the Anthropology master’s program at UVA. She graduated with Honors from Dartmouth College where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and majored in Native American Studies and minored in Environmental Studies. Her senior thesis, Visual Sovereignty and the Contemporary Resistance of Colonial Ecocide in the Navajo Nation, examined the concept of visual sovereignty and how contemporary Indigenous art serves as an allegory to resist environmental degradation from natural resource extraction (coal, oil, and uranium) in the Navajo Nation, with the ability to uphold and assert greater claims to political sovereignty. She has held a range of internships at the Hood Museum of Art, Smithsonian's Nation Museum of the American Indian (Washington D.C.), and Diné Policy Institute. 

Tia is Diné and grew up in the rural town of Tuba City, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation. As a Bridge fellow at UVA, she continues to expand her research interests of Native American art and (mis)representation, visual sovereignty, Indigenous futurisms, tribal energy industries, and federal Indian law. She is committed to Indigenous research methodologies that empower Indigenous communities by centering Indigenous perspectives, voices, and traditional knowledge.