Tammi Hanawalt is the curator of art at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming. She attended Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where she received a BFA in theater design and later her master's degree in art history. Hanawalt earned her PhD from the University of Oklahoma in 2017. Her dissertation focused on animal trickster figures represented in Native North American art. Hanawalt has worked in professional and academic theater in Arizona and California and was a staff costume designer at ASU. She taught costume design and art history at ASU and OU and taught online at the Institute of American Indian Art. She has been a contributing writer to First American Art Magazine and other national publications. Most recently, she curated the exhibition Un/Natural Selections: Wildlife in Contemporary Art, which opened at NMWA in May of 2021 and is currently on a national tour, and edited the accompanying catalogue.

She is the Wyoming curator for the Women to Watch exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.