Nordic Heritage Museum CEO Eric Nelson announced today that Lizette Gradén has been appointed Chief Curator for the Nordic Heritage Museum.

Gradén will be responsible for providing management of the Museum’s curatorial department encompassing education, public programs, exhibitions, and collections staff. The Chief Curator is responsible for leading the department in the planning and implementation of quality exhibitions, educational programs, and publications.

“I am pleased to welcome Lizette Gradén to the museum. Her extensive background in museums in Scandinavia and the US, along with her background in Nordic and Nordic-American folklore, is a great fit for the Nordic Heritage Museum," said Nelson in a statement. "Dr. Gradén’s background will help us to extend our reach not only within our community but internationally as well."

Dr. Gradén has held a position as Director of Graduate Studies at Konstfack/University College of Art, Craft and Design in Sweden since 2007, where she worked to increase cooperation between departments as well as among institutions of higher education in the Nordic countries.

She recently served as an advisor for an exhibition on new Nordic craft at Sweden’s Rackstad Museum. She is currently serving as leader of the research project Nordic Spaces in the North and North America: Heritage Preservation in Real and Imagined Nordic Places, part of the program “Nordic Spaces” at the Bank of Sweden’s Tercentenary Foundation. She has held several roles in the Swedish-American sphere, often as advisor or cultural broker, connecting groups, people and institutions.

Trained as an Ethnologist/Folklorist at Stockholm University, Dr. Gradén has a special interest in Swedish-American culture, folk art and fashion. She has extensive experience in the field of cultural preservation, and has worked with traveling exhibitions at Nordiska museet, Kulturhuset and Leksands kulturhus, Museum of International Folk Art and The Ellis Island Immigration Museum, as well as numerous Scandinavian American institutions.

She has served as a guest lecturer at a number of Scandinavian universities, including Iceland University, and has given presentations at the Swedish-Finnish Folklore Society, Voksenåsen in Oslo, and Hanaholmen in Helsinki.

Dr. Gradén has also worked closely with the leaders of MFA programs at such organizations as Denmark’s Designskole, Konsthøgskolen i Oslo, Konsthøgskolen i Bergen, the Iceland Academy of Arts, Aalto University, and Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Her books and articles include the prize-winning dissertation On Parade: Making Heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas (2003), a project on Nordic Fashion and Costume involving scholars from all Nordic countries titled Modets Metamorfoser: den klädda kroppens identiteter and förvandlingar (2009), co-edited with Magdalena Peterson McIntyre, and Performing a Present from the Past: The Värmland Heritage Gift, Materialized Emotions and Cultural Connectivity in Ethnologia Europaea (2010). Her new book, Performing Nordic Heritage: Museums and Everyday Life, will be released this fall.