Gerald Lombardi is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who for the past twenty years has been traversing the border between academia and business: “The appeal of anthropology to me is its ability to create useful pretexts for vicariously experiencing other people’s lives.” In that pursuit, Gerald has studied the use of cameras as divinatory tools by members of an apocalyptic Roman Catholic sect, spent a year as in-house cultural historian at one of the world’s largest investment banks, attended law school classes for a study of how people learn to think like attorneys, and frequented halfway houses and juvenile detention centers while evaluating programs for at-risk teenagers in New York City.

Gerald has a particular interest in personal uses of technology by cosmopolitan middle classes, and conducted two years of scholarly research in Brazil on how people there incorporated the Internet into their everyday lives and thinking. He is currently a director at Hall & Partners Health in New York, the healthcare practice of the London-based brand and communications consultancy. Prior to that he was Vice President and Director of Observational and Ethnographic Research at GfK Custom Research North America, and was part of the Experience Modeling practice at Sapient, the technology consulting firm.

Before becoming an anthropologist, Gerald was a photographer and video producer, and devoted a great deal of time to documenting the human aftermath of deindustrialization in New England. During the transition between his two principal careers he curated a major historical exhibition on Portuguese exploration of the Atlantic world at the dawn of the modern age, which was presented at the New York Public Library and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.

Gerald was trained at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.) and New York University (M.A., Ph.D.), and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, at NYU and at Parsons the New School for Design.