Florida Folklife Council
The Florida Folklife Council consists of seven members appointed by the Secretary of State to provide geographical, ethnic and professional representation. Members advise and assist the Division of Historical Resources and the Florida Folklife Program with respect to the following goals. Members advise and assist the Division of Historical Resources and the Florida Folklife Program with respect to the following goals:
- building statewide public interest and participation in folklife;
- developing and promoting traditional artists, performers, and folklife resources;
- recommending projects for the identification, collection, preservation and presentation of Florida cultural heritage throughout the state;
- and developing proposals to fund projects
Listen to the first Folklife Council meeting recorded on October 16, 1979, on Florida Memory.
Upcoming Meetings & Materials
Dr. Peggy A. Bulger
Folklorist
Fernandina Beach
Term: 9/1/2023-9/1/2027
Dr. Bulger served as the Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999-2011. She began her professional career as Florida's first state folklorist (1975-1988) before becoming the Folk Arts Director and Senior Program Officer for the Southern Arts Federation, now South Arts. Dr. Bulger served as president of the American Folklore Society, co-authored South Florida Folklife, and edited Musical Roots of the South. She has produced several recordings, including Deep South Musical Roots Tour and Drop On Down in Florida, and has directed several ethnographic films. Dr. Bulger earned a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation is a study of folklorist and activist Stetson Kennedy, who was the director of folklore, oral history and ethnic studies for the Florida Writers' Project of the WPA during the 1930s and 1940s. After retiring from the American Folklife Center, Dr. Bulger returned to Florida where she continues to be active in the field of folklife with research projects and consultancies.
Dr. Annette B. Fromm
Folklorist
Miami
Term: 1/30/24 – 1/30/2028
Dr. Fromm is the former Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies program at Florida International University. Dr. Fromm, a folklorist and museum specialist, has over thirty years of experience in museums and community projects in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Florida. Her work has ranged from institutions which emphasize ethnic cultural differences to studies in historic preservation. Dr. Fromm has published articles on immigrant-ethnic groups in America, Native Americans in museums, multicultural museums, historic preservation and community, Jews in Greece, Sephardic folklore, Greek folklore, and folk art. Fromm is the past-President of the International Committee of Museums of Ethnography, an international committee of the International Council of Museums.
Dr. Lanlan Kuang
Professor, UCF
Orlando
Term: 8/1/23- 8/1/27
Professor Dr. Lanlan Kunag holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, Bloomington, and was a Fulbright scholar in China in 2008–2009. A prize-winning documentary film producer, Kuang has worked with organizations such as the USIA and the SCOLA Educational Network as liaison and project director. She specializes in Asian arts and humanities, aesthetics, museum and heritage studies, film, and media studies, and teaches cross-disciplinarily in the Philosophy Department at the University of Central Florida. Her fieldwork extends across Eurasia, along the ancient Silk Road.
Kuang's 2016 monograph, Dunhuang Performing Arts, is part of the Pishu series published by the prestigious Social Sciences Academic Press—a press ranked among Asia's leading think tanks by Foreign Policy magazine. It is held at the Harvard-Yenching Library, the Princeton-Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, the OSU Music and Dance Library, and other research venues around the globe. Her most recent monograph, Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China's New Cosmopolitan Heritage (Indiana University Press, 2024)—held at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library—is the first major English-language study of how Silk Road performance is staged into a modern Chinese worldview. An interdisciplinary account of heritage as it is constructed and embodied, it distills two decades of fieldwork into a landmark contribution to Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology.
Recognized for her contributions to safeguarding folk arts and heritage culture, Kuang has been invited to give talks nationally at UVA and UC Berkeley, and internationally in South Korea and Türkiye. She has served as Chair of the Florida State Department Folklife Council and President of the Florida Folklore Society, and she sits on the editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals and book series internationally.
Dr. Celeste Landeros
Professor of English and Humanities, Barry University
Miami
Term: 1/1/23 - 1/1/27
Dr. Landeros is an artist, arts journalist and scholar who specializes in opera and carnival. A trained classical soprano, she has studied Afro-Cuban, Haitian and Colombian folkloric dance, drumming and song for more than two decades and has performed with the folkloric troupes Iroko Afro-Cuban Dance Theater and Troupe Manno Mercier. She is the founder and director of Carnival Arts, an arts education program that has offered workshops in the dance, drumming and masquerade traditions of the Caribbean and Latin America for youth across the state of Florida. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Dance Research Journal, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and Public: A Journal of Imagining America. She is the co-editor of the anthology Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Duke University Press, 1997) and is currently completing a manuscript on Carnival Arts for Caribbean Studies Press. Dr. Landeros shares her knowledge of popular and folkloric performance with the general public, as a regular arts contributor to the Miami Herald, WLRN radio, Miami New Times and Opera News and as the founding editor of the South Florida arts media bureau, Artburstmiami.com.
Tina Marie Osceola
5/1/2024- 5/1/2028
Ms. Osceola is an enrolled member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and is the director of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) since 2021, where she directly supervises over all cultural activities and resources on tribal lands, including preserving the archaeological, historic, and cultural sites of significance to the Seminole Tribe. Since September, she has been serving as Interim Executive Director of Operations for the Seminole Tribe. She has spent most of her professional working for the Tribe, either as Chief Historic Resources Officer from 2004 to 2011 or as Trial Judge for the Tribe from 2014 to 2021. She also spent six years working for the Collier County Sherrif’s Office in several administrative roles.
Dr. Natalie Underberg-Goode
Term: 1/1/23 - 1/1/27
Dr. Natalie Underberg-Goode is Professor of Digital Media and Folklore at the University of Central Florida Nicholson School of Communication and Media, specializing in the use of digital media to preserve and disseminate folklore and cultural heritage. She is the lead author of the co-authored work Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media (University of Texas Press, 2013), author of Multiplicity and Cultural Representation in Transmedia Storytelling (Routledge, December 2022) as well as more than 30 articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Her research has been presented at many national and international conferences. In addition to research, Dr. Underberg-Goode has developed core courses for the Digital Media and Latin American Studies programs and electives for the Film and Texts and Technology programs at UCF. She currently teaches courses on digital storytelling and research.
