Leadership

UW College of Arts & Sciences

The Burke Museum is governed by the University of Washington Board of Regents and administered by the College of Arts and Sciences.

Interim Executive Director
Sara Gonzalez

Dr. Sara L. Gonzalez was appointed interim executive director of the Burke Museum in March 2025. She joined the museum in 2020 as curator of archaeology and served as associate director for research and collections from August 2024 to February 2025. Dr. Gonzalez joined UW faculty in 2013 and is an associate professor in the Anthropology department, adjunct associate professor of American Indian Studies, and is currently appointed as a Mark A. Emmert Distinguished Professor. From 2021 to March 2025, she also served as the director of the Quaternary Research Center, an interdisciplinary environmental science center at UW.

An anthropological archaeologist by training, Dr. Gonzalez works at the intersection of Indigenous studies, tribal historic preservation, and public history. Her research contributes to the growing field of Indigenous and community-based archaeologies. These sovereignty-driven approaches are committed to the integration of Indigenous knowledges and research methods into archaeological practice and historic preservation and recognize the fundamental rights of Tribal and Indigenous Nations to determine how and in what ways their heritage is cared for and protected now and into the future. As a core fea­ture of this work she explores the diverse appli­ca­tions of minimally- and non-invasive field methods and dig­i­tal media as tools for tribal historic preservation. Alongside this research she developed and co-directed multiple community-based, Indigenous archaeology field schools, including Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. These programs train the next generation of archaeologists and heritage managers what it means to do archaeology with, by, and for a Tribal Nation.