Jesi Lujan Bennett

Jesi Lujan Bennett is the Director of Decolonizing Initiatives at the Museum of Us (since January 2024) and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Museum Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Her research focuses on Chamoru visual culture, examining colonialism's impact on migration patterns, militarization, and self-representation among Chamoru communities in the Mariana Islands and global diasporas. Central to her work is analyzing how diasporic Chamorus articulate their indigeneity in new geographic and cultural contexts amid Micronesian socio-political shifts.

Bennett is the recipient of the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund for her project “Chamoru Diasporic Routes: Sharing Our Elders’ Stories from Sanlagu (Overseas)”, which explores transnational storytelling and cultural preservation.