Biography
Kiersten Neumann is an art historian, archaeologist, curator, and educator specializing in ancient West Asia (Near East), with a focus on Assyria and Persia, as well as connections with Arabia. Her publications, teaching, and speaking engagements explore sensory experience, ritualized practice, and visual culture, as well as museum practice, collecting histories, provenance research, and cultural heritage management and preservation. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East (2022) and Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and classification in cuneiform cultures (UCL Press, June 2026).
At the ISAC Museum, Neumann has curated numerous exhibitions, including Joseph Lindon Smith: The Persepolis Paintings (2022), Making Sense of Marbles: Roman Sculpture at the OI (2022–2023), Artifacts Also Die (2023), and Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined (2025–2026), in addition to the museum’s permanent galleries as part of a complete renovation (2019).
Neumann has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Iraq (Nineveh), Turkey (Tell Tayinat), and Greece (Athenian Agora) and in 2016, she helped host ISAC’s “Ancient Land of Persia” travel program in Iran. She also collaborates on international museum, art, and cultural heritage projects. In 2024, she joined the Board of Trustees of the American Society of Overseas Research.
Originally from Vancouver, Canada, she earned her B.A. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, for which she received a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and was awarded The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) Donny George Youkhana Dissertation Prize for the best U.S. doctoral dissertation on ancient Iraq.
