Linda Durham

Linda Durham’s professional and personal life centers on art, artists, global travel, and humanitarian causes. She is the founder and director of Santa Fe’s Wonder Institute, which sponsors art exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and salons focused on discovering and implementing creative solutions to contemporary social and cultural issues. For more than three decades, Durham promoted New Mexico-based artists as the hands-on owner of a contemporary art gallery with seven exhibition locations through the years: six in Santa Fe, and one in New York. In 2012, the New Mexico Museum of Art acquired her extensive gallery archives. A prolific writer and speaker, she has been guest lecturer or workshop presenter at Brigham Young University, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio Wesleyan University, Yale University, the Sundance Institute, the College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe Community College, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. For her seventieth birthday, Durham circumnavigated the world in seventy days, meeting Indigenous women, educators, artists, entrepreneurs, and peace activists, and planting “Seeds of Peace” in gardens, schoolyards, and parks in South Africa, Lesotho, Madagascar, Thailand, Myanmar, and Hawaii.