Nora Naranjo-Morse

Nora Naranjo-Morse (born 1953) is a Santa Clara Pueblo poet, ceramicist, and filmmaker whose work spans the domestic and the cosmic, the everyday and the ceremonial. Her clay figures — particularly the recurring character Pearlene, a contemporary Pueblo woman navigating modern life with wit and resilience — and her poetry explore the pleasures and pressures of Indigenous identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her 1992 poetry collection "Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay" is considered a landmark of Native American literature, weaving together verses and photographic documentation of her ceramic figures. She was commissioned to create "Always Becoming," a monumental outdoor installation of clay and stone at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. She has also directed documentary films about Pueblo life and culture.