Sallie Anna Steiner Pisera

I am a folklorist with experience in public arts and culture work, academic research, and non-profit and cooperative administration. I currently serve as director (leiar) at Sunnfjord Museum, an open-air ethnographic museum in Førde, Norway. Sunnfjord Museum is an affiliate institution of the regional consortium Museums of Sogn og Fjordane.

I earned my doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019 with a dissertation entitled "Stitched Together: Craft and Community at a Refugee Sewing Group." This dissertation draws from two years of fieldwork I did within a sewing group run by and for refugee women settled in a small city in rural Western Norway.

I also earned my MA in Folklore from UW-Madison, and an edit of my MA thesis about tapestry ("smett") weavers from Indre Sunnfjord, Norway, was published as an article with the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics.

From 2022-2024, I served as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures. My project, "Interwoven Roots and Routes: Somali and Scandinavian Women Crafting Transnational Community," examined relationships between members of East African and Scandinavian diasporas living in Minnesota and Wisconsin. My focus was particularly on women's lives and creative expressions in these transnational diasporas. The project resulted in public events put on in partnership with Pioneer Village Museum (Barron County Historical Society), the Somali Museum of Minnesota, and local community partners in Barron, WI, and the surrounding area.

I have a passion for public humanities and for human rights advocacy and have worked with a variety of grassroots, non-profit, and governmental organizations working in these areas in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Norway.