Gabrielle Miller is a Program Specialist and Archaeologist for the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In the CSGS Gabrielle liaises with various departments across the NMAAHC as well as with national and international partners outside of the Smithsonian with a specific focus related to the Slave Wrecks Project and other CSGS collaborations throughout the program’s initiatives. She engages in and facilitates maritime archaeological research and training programs on four continents, collaborating with institutions and communities across the African Diaspora. She received her M.A. in 2016 at the University of Arizona and is a PhD student at the University of Tulsa studying African Diaspora Archaeology.

Her philosophies and praxis as a scholar center on resistance, reclamation, and colonial deconstruction and as an extension of this ethic, she engages archaeology as just one of many tools that can be claimed and molded to create a more holistic and representational narrative of the past to re-establish people of African descent as the authorities of their own narratives, especially in spaces of scientific inquiry. Her current research project engages the expressions and legacies of freedom and resistance through material culture in an eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century free Black community in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands in collaboration with the heritage practitioners, artisans, historians, and descendants of that community.

Term

Gabrielle Miller was appointed in 2024. Her term ends July 21, 2026.