In addition to serving as a lecturer for IGE, Dr. Polkis Senior Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Popular Arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from the UCLA Folklore & Mythology Program in 2002 and his primary research interests include material religion and visual piety, religion and healing, popular belief and religion in North America and Latin America, and African Diasporic sacred arts. He has published scholarly books and articles on these topics and has also curated more than two dozen museum exhibitions. His research and exhibition projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the California Endowment, the Harvard Pluralism Project, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).
