Dana Walrath

Dana Walrath, an award-winning writer, artist and anthropologist, is a faculty member of University of Vermont's College of Medicine. After earning her PhD in medical and biological anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, she taught there and at Temple University. Dr. Walrath broke new ground in paleoanthropology through her work on the evolution of human childbirth. She has also written on a wide range of topics related to gender in paleoanthropology, the social production of sickness and health, sex differences, genetics, and evolutionary medicine. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and in journals such as Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Anthropology Now. Her books include Aliceheimer's, a graphic memoir, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel. She developed a novel curriculum in medical education at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine that brings humanism, anthropological theory and practice, narrative medicine, and professional skills to first-year medical students. She has an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has exhibited her artwork in North America and Europe. Her recent work in the field of graphic medicine combines anthropology with memoir and visual art. Spanning a variety of disciplines, her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Vermont Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She spent 2012-2013 as a Fulbright Scholar at the American University of Armenia and the Institute of Ethnography and Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. She is working on a second graphic memoir that combines her Aliceheimer's work with her fieldwork on aging and memory in Armenia.