Leila Hamdan

Leila Hamdan, Memphis, Tennessee
Collections Manager and Archivist, Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Leila Hamdan is an art historian with almost twenty years of experience in archiving, curating, and preserving works, as well as serving as a vital channel in educating the public about those works. Her knowledge and curiosity have helped nationally recognized cultural institutions such as the Metal Museum and Penland School of Craft to preserve priceless American artifacts. A lifelong steward of art and material culture, Hamdan’s dedication to its research, record, and care has been rewarded with a breadth of opportunity to share the stories told by both visual and audio pieces and their creators. Hamdan is a Lebanese American from the Deep South delta region who specializes in American and African American art and history. She processes, catalogs, and preserves ephemera and objects belonging to arts and cultural institutions to make information useful and accessible. As an academic, she studies works of art, music, photographs, and documents to illustrate a more nuanced and detailed story about historical events and individuals centered around the counter-narrative and the underrepresented subject.