Igor Krupnik sitting at a desk and smiling.

Igor Krupnik

Igor Krupnik is Curator of Arctic and Northern Ethnology collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. He is currently in charge of some 30,000 ethnological objects at the NMNH originating from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Siberia, and the southern portion of the NW Coast. He has degrees in Geography (1973, University of Moscow), ethnography/cultural anthropology (Ph.D. 1977, Institute of Ethnology, Russian Academy of Sciences), and in ecology/subsistence management (Full Doctorate, 1991, Institute of Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences). His area of expertise includes modern cultures, ecological knowledge, and cultural heritage of the people of the Arctic, primarily in Alaska and Siberia; culture change and contact history; human ecology; history of Arctic science and Arctic indigenous studies; impact of modern climate change on Arctic residents, their economies, and cultures. For the past twenty years, he has worked with local Yupik and Inupiat communities in the Bering Strait Region (in Alaska and Russia) on various collaborative efforts, primarily in the documentation, publication, and sharing cultural knowledge with the host communities, and in opening archival and museum collections for people’s use in educational and heritage programs. He published and edited several books and collections, and numerous papers, including five edited volumes on indigenous knowledge and use of sea ice, and observations of Arctic environmental change