Member Profile
Gail Ryser
Deserted (Parts 1 & 2) Interdisciplinary video film project
Together with ASU photography student Thorman, IGERTs Strawhacker, Cutts, Hale, Larson & Darby collaborated on a 2 part video photography essay entitled “Deserted: Forgetting Nature, Humanity & History... More »
About Me
Gail Ryser has served as a program coordinator for Arizona State University’s IGERT in urban ecology since 2002. She embraces interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving and enjoys challenges for capacity building, networking and engaging the larger community to achieve outcomes.
Ryser left a career in the maritime industry to earn a Masters degree in Anthropology from Northern Arizona University where her research focused on change through time in the economic and cultural value of particular domestic plants in coastal Peru as represented in the art and the archaeological botanical record.
Concurrently with her IGERT responsibilities she is engaged in interdisciplinary research in the central Andean region applying her specialty in paleoethnobotany and technical studies of textile production to investigate social and economic organization and social identity of pre-Columbian coastal Andean society. In addition to ongoing research, during the past 14 years Ryser has collaborated with numerous international research projects in Peru, developed and lead workshops teaching Peruvian archaeologists data recovery methods and analysis specific to paleobotanics, and field conservation and analysis of archeological textiles. She is a board member of Asociación Peruana de Conservación Textil (APECOT), Trustee and founding board member for Museo Textil Tradicional y Moda (MTTM), Ferrenafe, District of Lambayeque, Peru, and holds a professional archaeology license in Peru (Registro Nacional de Arqueología, Perú).
She remains active in local community through service on the Board of Directors for Watershed Management Group in Arizona; community building through founding and co-chairing a community garden and; as a “connector” in a multi-agent network bringing together stakeholders to complete an action project addressing concerns of health and well being.
