Tanya Treptow

A user-experience researcher, story-seeker, and meaning-maker, Tanya Treptow helps museums, performing arts, and cultural organizations (loosely defined) to evolve new roles in their communities. She uses anthropological and sociological tools to understand the deeper mechanisms of public engagement: how people see the world, how they connect to each other, and how cultural experiences fit into the picture. Tanya’s passion for naturalistic and participatory research methods, coupled with her background in experience design, has helped her support individual arts and culture organizations as well as broader change initiatives and learning communities, including OF/BY/FOR ALL, the Irvine Foundation’s New California Arts Fund, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Cleveland Orchestra, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Folk Alliance International. Tanya has contributed to several of Slover Linett’s recent national public reports, including Black Perspectives on Creativity, Trustworthiness, Welcome and Well-Being: A Qualitative Study (part of Culture + Community in a Time of Transformation: A Special Edition of Culture Track) as well as Turn Up the Mic , Tune Up the Future: A National Research Study of Roots Musicians in the U.S (funded by Whippoorwill Arts).

Before joining Slover Linett in 2015, Tanya worked in curatorial departments at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, researching and curating exhibitions of Egyptian, Indian, and Himalayan art. She was also a senior user experience specialist at Centralis, a research and design consultancy. She has presented on evaluation and technology at conferences including Museums and the Web, EdUI, and Museum Computer Network. Tanya began her academic training in computer science but switched to the social sciences, earning a B.S. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD in Islamic archaeology from the University of Chicago. While there, she also worked at UChicago’s Center for the Study of Languages and is conversant in Arabic (while also dabbling in Turkish, French, German, Polish, and Chinese).