Phillip Thomas MacDonald

Phillip MacDonald is a folklorist, librarian, archivist, photographer, and writer born, raised, and living among the long leaf pines in the beautiful piedmont region of North Carolina. Phillip holds an MS in Library Science from UNC-Chapel Hill where he completed his masters paper entitled, “Pop-Up Archive: How to Get the Public into Archives, by Taking the Archive to the Public.“ This project focused on the intersection of personal meaning and community archives. In addition to archival work, he fell in love with the DIY ethos and makerspace technologies- especially 3D modeling and printing, Augmented Reality, Microcontrollers, Drawing Machines, and Laser Cutting. Before discovering his passion of librarianship and archives, Phillip received an MA in Folklore from UNC-Chapel Hill where he completed his thesis entitled, "Birthplace of the Blues: Dockery Farms, The Mythic South, and the Erasure of the African American Lived Experience in Mississippi Blues Tourism." Phillip continues to engage with questions raised in his thesis, examining the intersectionality of identity, culture, and landscapes. Phillip's interest in the "lived experience" reaches beyond humans to non-human animals, yielding the photos and stories he tells about Music Maker Relief Foundation musicians or the residents of Piedmont Farm Animal Refuge. Whether it be through prose, photography, or a combination of the two, Phillip constructs stories about and for "folk" from all walks of life.