Luana K. Ross

Co-Director, Native Voices
Associate Professor, Women Studies
Adjunct Professor, American Indian Studies

Dr. Ross is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, located at Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oregon, and has been a professor at the University of California at Davis and at UC Berkeley before coming to the University of Washington.

Since her tenure with Native Voices, Dr. Ross has collaborated on several award-winning films including A Century of Genocide in the Americas: The Residential School Experience, and White Shamans, Plastic Medicine Men.

Dr. Ross has conducted extensive research on the experiences of women in prison, which resulted in many publications including a book, Inventing the Savage. This book was awarded the “Best Book of 1998” by the American Political Science Association. She was also awarded a Newberry Library Fellowship (Chicago) in 1994 and 1995. As well, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1995. Dr. Ross spent the year at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the host institution for the Ford Fellowship, with Dr. Angela Davis as her mentor.

Dr. Ross’s teaching and research interests include Indigenous Research and Production, Native Women, Visual Sociology, Criminality and Deviance, Race/Ethnic Relations, and Indigenous Methodology.