Staff Highlights: Juleana Enright
This year, we want community members to get to know us and to highlight our talented group of colleagues by doing staff highlights. We developed some “get to know you questions” for staff to answer. The first to be featured is Juleana Enright!
Juleana Enright (Lower Brulé, Lakota) is the All My Relations Arts Gallery and Programs Manager at NACDI. 
Describe yourself in one sentence.
Queer, Indigenous, poetically dualistic writer, curator and DJ who hates the Oxford comma.
What is one thing in your professional history that you are proud of?
Working at All My Relations Arts in general! To work alongside my community is beyond gratifying; it completes all of my values and aspirations. I love getting to witness and be part of stunning exhibitions, uplifting Native contemporary art and developing relationships with such incredible Native artists. It’s an honor to watch them thrive in their practices. I think little me would think I have a really cool, rewarding job.
What is something you are working on outside of NACDI that you are excited about?
I recently wrote the essays for the Jerome Fellowship artist catalog and am excited to moderate a discussion with them about their work at the end of the month. More on their exhibition and a link to the catalog can be found HERE
What would you like your legacy to be?
This is such a hard one, as I feel my definitions of success and legacy have altered and evolved as I get older. Honestly, if I can just be known as someone who has an unwavering passion and commitment to the arts, to queer artists specifically, as someone who has an endless search for knowledge, who is kind and compassionate, a moderately decent writer and impeccably good taste in music, I’d be pretty stoked about that legacy.
Which talent would you most like to have?
An immunity to writer’s block.
If you could choose one song to play every time you walked into a room, what would you choose and why?
This is an impossible question for me. It changes at a whim depending on my mood or if I’m walking into a professional room or queer nightclub. I’ll say ATM, “Ray of Light” by Mallrat.
Juleana Enright (they/them) is an Indigenous, queer, non-binary writer, independent curator, DJ and theatre artist living in Minneapolis. They are an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Lakota Tribe. Juleana is the Gallery and Programs Manager at All My Relations Arts and a current writers fellow for MnArtists. Their past roles have included Culture Editor for l’étoile magazine and Communications Specialist for Gamut Gallery. They have contributed to local platforms, Pride Magazine, mplsart, Primer, MnArtists and City Pages. Juleana has curated four art exhibitions and was a recipient of the Emerging Curators Institute 2020-21 Fellowship program where they exhibited “biskaabiiyang (returning to ourselves),” an exploration of Indigenous Futurism. In 2020, they were a participating artist in “Controlled Burn” at the Phoenix Theatre, where they exhibited, “To Wash the Native Out of Us” – an audio/visual installation on the history of Indian boarding schools, through the lens of family experience. Through their practice, Juleana strives to examine the act of daily creation in the midst of great chaos and explore what it means to be a contemporary 2spirit artist with a focus on Indigenous Futurism through art and performance.