GEORGE MacDONALD, PhD, FRSC

George MacDonald was appointed as President of the Bill Reid Foundation in Vancouver in February 2005 and, in a new partnership with Simon Fraser University, to work towards creating the Bill Reid Centre of Northwest Coast Art Studies at the university.

Dr. MacDonald was born and brought up in Southern Ontario. He obtained his Honours BA in Anthropology from the University of Toronto in 1961, and his PhD in Anthropology from Yale University five years later.

He began work with the National Museum of Canada while still a student, as an archaeologist for the Atlantic provinces, then for the West Coast in 1966. He became Head of the Western Canada section of the National Museum of Man, then Chief of the Archeology Division in 1969. He continued rising through the ranks at the National Museum in the 1970s and early 1980s, and was appointed the founding Director of the successor institution, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC) in 1983. Dr. MacDonald became President, CEO and Executive Director of the CMC Corporation in 1995.

Dr. MacDonald was appointed CEO of the five museums of the Australian state of Victoria and Director of the Melbourne Museum in 1999, overseeing its building and exhibition design. Similarly at the University of Washington in Seattle, he supervised the production of a four-phase facility expansion plan as Director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture from 2001 to 2004.

Through the years of running museums, Dr. MacDonald has held concurrent academic positions, at the universities of Washington, Melbourne, Toronto, Carleton, Ottawa, and Trent. In 1977-78, he was a research fellow at the Museum of Volkerkunde in Basel, Switzerland and in 1981-82, he was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology and a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at SFU.

A renown expert on Northwest Coast art, Dr. MacDonald’s seminal work on the subject is Haida Monumental Art, published by UBC Press. Some others are: Haida Art, Chiefs of the Sea and the Sky, and Ninstints: A World Heritage Site.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and holds an LLD from the University of Calgary.

He is married to Joanne (Rice) and they have two adult children, Christine and Grant.