Magdalena Zych

Cultural anthropologist, graduate of the doctoral studies in Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University.

Curator and keeper at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. Since 2009 she coordinates research projects and cooperates with artists, activists and academics. She is creating space for critical intervention inside institution based on collections and permanent exhibition.

She was head of the research teams and co-curated exhibitions The Art of the Allotment (2012), Wedding 21 (2016), she is co-author and co-editor of the books The Art of the Allotment (2012) and Weddings 21 (2016).

She worked in research teams of collaborative project: Awkward Objects of Genocide. Vernacular Art on the Holocaust and Ethnographic Museums, developed within the project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (Horizon2020, Reflective Society, 2016-2019), which resulted in the exhibition  Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust at The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków (2018-19). Currently she cooperates in the research project Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context (Beethoven, NCN/DFG, Humboldt Univ., with Roma Sendyka and Magdalena Waligórska, 2020-2023)

She is currently at work on reinterpretation of the museum’s Siberian collection (project Anthropological Reinterpretation of the Siberian Collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow Coming from the 19th Century Polish Researchers of Siberia (2016-2019) awarded by National Humanities Development Programme). The resoults of the research are currently presented on the exhibition Siberia. Voices from the North at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków (2020-2021) and on the museum website.

In her academic works she researches ethnographic collections in Poland in the international perspective.