Mannetta and Dr. Michael Braunstein

Mannetta ’93 and Dr. Michael Braunstein’s involvement with UNLV, and the Marjorie Barrick Museum in particular, extends back for decades and, thanks to their dedication to the university, our students, and the community, will reach well into the future. Beginning in 1978, only two years after relocating to Las Vegas, the Braunsteins donated hundreds of extraordinary pre-Columbian artifacts, antique retablos (portraits of saints painted on tin), rare old Guatemalan and Bolivian hand-woven textiles, and valuable Mexican dance masks.

Through the Braunstein Foundation, the Braunstein’s partnered with the Barrick Museum in 2006 to sponsor the Braunstein Symposium, an academic conference on ancient Mesoamerican cultures – free to UNLV students and faculty. The symposium provided a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research and allowed for interdisciplinary dialogue between experts in the fields of art history, linguistics, ethno-history, ethnology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology.