Jonaitis, Aldona, 1948-

Aldona Jonaitis (born 1948) is an American art historian, author, and director emerita of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. She has written several books focussing on Indigenous Northwest Coast art. A professor at Stony Brook University in the 1970s and 1980s, she was hired to work as the vice president for public programs at the American Museum of Natural History in 1989. While there, she produced the 1991 exhibition Chiefly Feasts, a display on potlaches as they have been celebrated by the Kwakwakaʼwakw people. She moved to Alaska in 1993 after being hired by the University of Alaska Museum of the North to work as their director and the associated University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to teach anthropology classes. Upon her initial retirement from the museum in 2009, the university made her a director emerita. She came back in 2012 to work as interim director, before retiring again in 2015. Jonaitis has received an Governor's Awards for the Humanities in 2015 for her work in Alaska, and a Curators Committee Award for Excellence by the American Alliance of Museums for her work curating Chiefly Feasts. As an author, her books include Art of the Northern Tlingit (1986), From the Land of the Totem Poles (1988), The Yuquot Whalers' Shrine (1999), The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History.(2010, with Aaron Glass) and Discovering Totem Poles (2012). She has also edited several books, including Chiefly Feasts (1991), Looking North (1998), and Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast (2020).