Shannyn Palmer
Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, researcher, and writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples in the place now known as Canberra, Australia. She is committed to the development of community-engaged practice as a pathway to enabling museums to connect with communities in ethical, meaningful, and empowering ways. Shannyn currently works as a consultant, helping cultural institutions to achieve best practice in community engagement and create meaningful collaborations.
She has over a decade of experience working in community engagement, facilitation and research with First Nations peoples and communities, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities, and government and non-government organisations in the arts, cultural, and cultural heritage sectors. Through this experience she has developed a rigorous approach to developing meaningful relationships and authentic engagement — the principles of deep engagement, genuine partnership, self-determination, two-way learning, co-creation, and cultural safety underpin her practice.
She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and recently published her first book with Melbourne University Press, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, which traces a history of colonisation in Central Australia from the perspective of Anangu who lived there.