Evangeline Mee, Traditional Arts Specialist

Evangeline Mee has served as the Traditional Arts Specialist at Tennessee Arts Commission since August 2019. Originally from Knoxville, Evangeline recently completed an MA in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She previously earned a BA in Dramatic Arts and Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2012, Highest Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa). In addition to her academic training, Evangeline has been involved in a variety of oral history research, filmmaking, and public folklife projects. She spent three summers working at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC. In 2012, she was a research intern at the Vermont Folklife Center, where her ethnographic fieldwork focused primarily on researching the musical traditions of local Bhutanese and Somali communities. That same year, Evangeline was awarded the Frances Ferris Hall Grant from the Center for the Study of the American South to conduct oral history interviews with women environmental activists in Appalachia. Before entering the Master’s program at Indiana, she taught world history, geography, and classical studies in Bangkok, Thailand, and Louisville, Kentucky. During her first year as a graduate student, she assisted the Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and served as an editorial assistant for Museum Anthropology Review. Most recently Evangeline worked as a graduate assistant for the American Folklore Society. You can find Evangeline’s work in Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History and on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival blog. Her documentary films The Ridge, about an eco-village community in Knoxville, and Dancing Community, about contra dancers in Louisville, Kentucky, are available on YouTube.