BIOGRAPHY
Tina Kuckkahn, J.D., is a citizen of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and a descendant of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. Since 1996, her career has been dedicated to nurturing Indigenous arts and cultures through a lifelong commitment to supporting Native artists and culture bearers through various educational and philanthropic initiatives.
At the Evergreen State College, Tina served as the founding Director of the Longhouse Education and Cultural Center, a center dedicated to advancing Native arts and cultures. She established programming to directly serve Native artists, including developing classes, workshops, grants, markets, and art residencies. The latter included initializing exchanges with international Indigenous artists throughout the Pacific Rim. After more than 20 years leading the Longhouse, Tina eventually became the college’s first Vice President of Indigenous Arts, Education, and Tribal Relations. She then expanded her planning to include the establishment of an Indigenous Arts Campus, which involved the construction of buildings explicitly dedicated to carving, weaving, and fiber arts.
After her extensive commitment to Native arts education, she shifted her focus to a more expansive approach to Indigenous philanthropy and joined NDN Collective, “an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power.” She began as NDN’s Director of Grantmaking, overseeing a variety of grant programs, including the Radical Imagination Artists Grant Program. She eventually became the Managing Director of the NDN Foundation, which allowed her a wider purview as a thought leader shaping and refining the organization’s holistic strategy through the liberation and rematriation of wealth that honors sovereignty and community self-determination.
A published author and executive producer of several documentary films, Tina has endeavored to expand the Indigenous arts ecology in a variety of ways, always with a commitment to grassroots community building at the core of her practice.
