Dexter Cirillo holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Beginning with her service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, South America, from 1965-1967, she has carved out a professional career devoted to advancing the literature and culture of minority groups in the United States. Her first teaching job in New York (1970-1974) was at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York, the first Puerto Rican college in the United States. From there she was hired by the Modern Language Association (1974-1978) to coordinate a nationwide program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to incorporate minority literature into the curriculum in colleges and universities across the country. With Robert B. Stepto, she edited Afro-American Literature – The Reconstruction of Instruction, a collection of essays that grew out of a groundbreaking seminar held at Yale University in 1977.

Recognizing the lack of representation for minority women writers in the curriculum, she published The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States in 1980, highlighting the literature of Asian American, Chicana, Native American, and Afro-American women. The Third Woman stayed in print for nineteen years and was used in women’s studies courses and ethnic literature programs at the collegiate level nationally. She has also annotated and written critical introductions to two reprint editions of works by American Indian women published by the University of Nebraska Press: American Indian Stories by ZitkalaSa and Cogewea –The Half Blood by Mourning Dove. (The above books were published under Dexter Fisher.)

In 1981, Dexter left academia to pursue her long-time interest in American Indian art as an independent scholar, art dealer, and curator. In 1992, she published Southwestern Indian Jewelry (New York: Abbeville Press), “one of a few to document contemporary Indian jewelry and one of a smaller number to incorporate interviews with living artists.” In 1998, she published Across Frontiers – Hispanic Crafts of New Mexico (San Francisco: Chronicle Books). Her 2008 book, Southwestern Indian Jewelry – Crafting New Traditions (New York: Rizzoli), charts the “new generation” of jewelers to emerge since the mid-1980s. There are over eighty artists in the book, representing eighteen tribes, sixty of whom are new from her first book on the subject. As with her previous books, Dexter has interviewed all of the artists in the book.

Her 2008 lecture tour includes the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, the Denver Art Museum, Arizona State Museum, the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian Institution in New York City, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, and the Indian Craft Shop at the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. She has also lectured at the Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, the Palm Springs Desert Museum, and the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico.