Dr. Joan Tenenbaum is a studio goldsmith and jewelry teacher who started studying her craft in high school and has been making jewelry for more than 46 years.  From an early age her first love was always making jewelry, but her path led at the outset to an academic life.  She studied anthropology and linguistics and received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. from Columbia University.  Research for her dissertation took her to a tiny village in Alaska where she lived with Athabaskan Indians and wrote a grammar and dictionary of their language.  She later lived with Yup’ik and Iñupiaq Eskimos in several villages, teaching and coordinating programs for the University of Alaska.  During all these years she continued to make jewelry and to study technique, and never gave up her dream to one day be a full time metalsmith.  

Joan Tenenbaum’s work displays the transformation that occurred as a result of her experiences living as an anthropologist in the wilderness villages of Alaska.  During her years there the environment, culture and spirituality of the native peoples with which she lived gradually entered her designs.  Though always believing that she had to choose between anthropology and jewelry, it was only after leaving Alaska that the surprising synthesis happened.  In spite of herself she began to fuse her anthropological background with her jewelry work, and what has resulted is an original body of work into which is woven the stories, traditions, landscapes and spiritual beliefs of the native peoples of Alaska.  Usually anthropologists live with people, understand their culture and interpret it to the world through books.  By contrast, Joan Tenenbaum’s interpretation comes through her jewelry.