Suzanne Seriff is a folklorist, curator, and lecturer, currently living in Austin, Texas. She received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in Folklore and Anthropology in 1989, and has lectured and published widely in the fields of American and Greater Mexican folk art. Her personal and professional interest in folk toys and festival arts has led her around the world, from South Texas and Mexico to India and Japan, where she has studied and worked with some of the master toymakers and festival art producers of our time. Her book on a South Texas Mexican figural ceramist, Snakes, Sirens, Virgins, and Devils: The Politics of Representation of a Texas-Mexican Folk Artist, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and she is currently working on a book and museum project documenting the history and significance of a long-standing community of traditional papier mache festival toymakers in central Mexico.
Over the past several years, Seriff has put her passion for the ephemeral and the functional in folk art to work as project co-director and co-editor, with Charlene Cerny, Museum of International Folk Art Director, of a major touring exhibition and scholarly catalogue on recycling as a folk aesthetic around the world. The "Award-Winning" exhibition, Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap, opened in May 1996 for an extended venue at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and will subsequently travel to several museums around the country. The catalogue of the same title, published by Harry N. Abrams of New York, includes essays by twelve prominent scholars on recycled folk art and aesthetics.