Harold T. Pinkett Student of Color Award: Katelyn Landry-Carranza

Katelyn Landry-Carranza, who recently graduated with her MA in Archives and Public History from New York University, is the 2025 recipient of the Harold T. Pinkett Student of Color Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The Pinkett Award was established in 1993 to encourage students of color to consider careers in the archival profession and to promote participation by people of color in SAA. The award honors archival pioneer Dr. Harold T. Pinkett, a dedicated SAA member who was the first African American to be appointed archivist at the National Archives, where he worked for more than thirty-five years.

Before entering her master’s program, Landry-Carranza received her BA in history from Rice University. As an undergraduate student, she worked on a team of student and faculty scholars using digitized archival materials to reconstruct the history of the nineteenth century coastwide slave trade to Texas for SlaveVoyages.org, the world’s largest online resource on forced migrations of enslaved people around the world. She also served as a preservation intern for the Galveston Historical Foundation where she created a digital exhibit in Omeka titled “Facing the Gulf: Learning Stories of Slavery in Galveston, 1816–1865.”

As a graduate student at NYU, she was a 2024–25 Archives Graduate Fellow at the Barnard College Archives and Special Collections, where she improved access to institutional records documenting student protests. She also worked as a graduate student researcher on a collaborative project between NYU and Sylvester Manor, where she helped highlight materials from the Sylvester Manor Archive that demonstrate histories of enslaved and free Black and Indigenous people, working-class Europeans, and women.

In 2024, Landry-Carranza was awarded a Digital Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship from NYU for her work on “Finding Mestizaje in Archival Metadata and Description.” This project investigated how mixed-race archival subjects are described in North American colonial collections, an under-researched topic within scholarship on reparative archival description. Thanks to the generous support of the Harold T. Pinkett Student of Color Award, she will be presenting this research at the “Emerging Voices in Archives” panel at ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2025. She is now employed as an archivist at the Galveston & Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library in Galveston, TX. Here, she will be preserving, processing, and providing access to collections that document the story of Galveston, nationally known as the birthplace of Juneteenth and site of the Great Storm of 1900.

Landry-Carranza has an outstanding academic record and is already making contributions to the profession and her community. As she wrote in her application letter, she looks forward to the opportunity to “network with archives professionals who have conducted research and accomplished real-world projects that reflect and expand [her] professional values.”