As Director and CEO of Heard Museum, David Roche oversees the largest private museum in the world dedicated to American Indian art and culture. As a recognized national and international leader in the field of American Indian art, his prior role was serving as the senior specialist for American Indian art at Sotheby’s Auction House in New York. He is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, lectures at museums and universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, and contributes to numerous scholarly publications.

Roche’s Fellowship will focus on developing a new, long-term exhibition that will draw on the Heard Museum’s permanent collection (which spans 1,500 years of Indigenous creativity and comprises 45,000 works). His plans include myriad meetings and site visits to cultural institutions that have recently mounted major installations of Indigenous art, such as Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington D.C.), and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (New Mexico). Efforts will also be made to meet with tribal cultural preservation officers on Sovereign lands in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, and Oklahoma. He will also participate in programs at The Harvard Division of Continuing Education to enhance his leadership and effectiveness within the organization, and especially related to the exhibition project, which will require working with a large, diverse, and intergenerational team of employees and advisors.