Emilie de Brigard

Upon returning from a summer of travel in Europe, then six-years-old Emilie de Brigard announced that she planned to live in a museum. Today, she is a supporter of the British Architectural Library Trust, the Museo Ixchel de Traje Indigena, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art — which in 2024 honored her for fifty years of service on its Board and committees.

With qualifications in social science and cinema, Emilie de Brigard organized a major retrospective of anthropological cinema at The Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Together with the choreometrician Alan Lomax, she collected films of work and dance for what is now the Global Jukebox, and for the director Jean Rouch, she produced the valedictory film, “Margaret Mead: A Portrait by a Friend.”

She served on the staffs of the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. Her dissertation, “The History of Ethnographic Film” (Mouton) was translated into eight languages. Her profiles of the visual anthropologists John Marshall and Edward T. Hall have appeared in scientific journals, such as Le Journal des Africanistes, American Anthropologist, and Current Anthropology.

In recent decades Emilie de Brigard has collected the work of African-American artists, and she has written survey articles about African Cinema (“A New Encyclopedia of Africa,” Macmillan).

Emilie de Brigard holds an AB from Harvard College and an MA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her avocation is music. She lives in New York and Guatemala with her husband and son, both architects. Her grandfather was an architect in New York City, whose work on the Morgan Library (1906) is still extant.