Introducing Maya Austin

This month, we welcomed a new team member to First Peoples Fund’s (FPF) staff — Maya Austin. Her abundant passion, experience, and knowledge will undoubtedly contribute to FPF’s mission to uplift Native artists and culture bearers in these challenging times.

Meet Maya Austin (Pasqua Yaqui, Blackfeet, Mexican-American)

Director / Program Weaver

“My sister is such a beautiful artist,” Maya says, claiming her sister got the family’s artistic genes — but Maya found her talent in supporting artists, especially filmmakers, through her former position as Senior Manager for the Indigenous Program at Sundance Institute. She identified and supported emerging Indigenous filmmakers and content creators across the United States and globally.

Maya is carrying this passion for artists into her role as Director - Program Weaver at First Peoples Fund. She will play a central role in integrating the programs of FPF to grow the Indigenous Arts Ecology.

Digesting the wealth of material that goes into the thought behind FPF’s programs, Maya realizes the depth of support the organization offers to Indian Country and looks forward to actualizing the vision of the FPF team and deepening their investment in the Indigneous Arts Ecology.

“As the Program Weaver Director, my goal is to weave all  programmatic strands to create a strong system of support through everything we’re doing so that all the programs and fellowships are representative of these different strands of work,” she says.

“What I love about the Indigenous Arts Ecology is how it’s grounded in community and ancestral knowledge. How do we grow and cultivate our creative arts landscape from there? That’s intriguing to me.”

For three years, Maya served as an Archivist and Grants Manager at the U.S. Department of Interior, Washington, DC, for the national Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Program. A board member of Vision Maker Media and the Cousin Collective, Maya has experience as a film curator, instructor, and trainer. She has a bachelor’s degree in History with a minor in Film and a master’s degree in Moving Image Archive Studies, both from UCLA.

“What drives me now is the continued commitment to nurture and invest in our artists,” she says. “The modalities of that through First Peoples Fund is exciting. As Indigenous peoples, we’ve always been expressive and telling stories. But it’s the modality in which we do it that changes and makes us resilient as a people.”

Maya first encountered FPF through her work with Sundance. As part of their programming, she incorporated financial literacy training, which FPF provided. Maya went on to become an Arts Program Specialist with the California Arts Council, a position she most recently held prior to becoming FPF’s Program Weaver.

Maya will be working remotely from her home in Sacramento, where she resides with her husband Tyler and their rescue dog, Wally.