Kenneth R. Lister joined the Department of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM, Toronto) in 1978 and retired in 2016 as Assistant Curator of Anthropology. He is now Departmental Associate in the ROM’s Department of Art and Culture. He was Head of the former Department of Anthropology, which holds more than 50,000 ethnographic artifacts pertaining to the world’s Indigenous Peoples. His primary curatorial responsibilities were the Subarctic and Arctic ethnographic collections, the ROM’s collection of canoes and kayaks, and the art of Canadian artist Paul Kane.  

Lister’s areas of research include archaeological fieldwork in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of northern Ontario, ethnographic research among the Cree of northern Ontario and the Inuit of Baffin Island, and field studies relating to sites sketched by Paul Kane. 

Based upon his Arctic research, Lister curated “In the Time of the Kayak: Hunting in the Eastern Canadian Arctic” (1994-1996), the inaugural exhibition of the ROM’s Gallery of Indigenous Peoples. He curated the exhibitions “Tuugaaq: Ivory Sculptures from the Eastern Canadian Arctic” and “Canada Collects: Treasures from Across the Nation.” Additionally, he has curated seven exhibitions devoted to the work of Paul Kane, including “The First Brush: Paul Kane and Infrared Reflectography.” The latter exhibition was the subject of his 2014 book of the same name. It followed the 2010 publication Paul Kane /the Artist/: Wilderness to Studio, published to celebrate the bicentennial of Paul Kane’s birth. In 2016, he published the ROM’s edition of Paul Kane’s 1859 narrative, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America. His latest book, Water for the Phalarope: Explorations in Museum Anthropology, was published in 2019. 

Lister continues to research and write and spends his time in the Fishing Islands archipelago of Lake Huron, on a trawler cruising Georgian Bay, and at home on an outer island in the Bay of Fundy.