Annita Hetoevehotohke’e Lucchesi is a researcher and scholar of Cheyenne and Italian descent, currently residing on her ancestral homelands in southeast Montana.
Annita earned her Ph.D. from the School of Geography, Development, & Environment at the University of Arizona, with a minor in Gender & Women’s Studies. She was a graduate scholar in the Native Nations Institute’s Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance and is a Board member of UA’s Gender Based Violence Consortium. She earned her B.A. in Geography with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. in American Studies from Washington State University.
Annita also serves as Founder and Director of Research & Outreach of Sovereign Bodies Institute (SBI), a non-profit research center dedicated to gender and sexual violence against Indigenous peoples. SBI is based in Montana but works alongside Indigenous peoples across the US, Canada, and Latin America.
Annita has years of experience in academia and higher education, community-based research, cartography, community organizing, and advocacy. Her areas of specialty include violence against Indigenous peoples, femicide, gender and sexual violence, Indigenous cartography and geography, Indigenous data sovereignty, and Indigenous research methodologies.