Dr Henrietta Hammant is a museum anthropologist with a love of the polar regions. She holds a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where she completed a dissertation examining the interactions between humans and polar bears in Arctic Alaska. She then undertook an MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she wrote her dissertation on the object biographies of a series of photographs held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

She has several years' experience working in museums in Canada and the UK, including the Itsanitaq Museum in Churchill, sub-Arctic Manitoba ('The Polar Bear Capital of the World') and, more recently, the Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute, part of the University of Cambridge. While at the Polar Museum she curated two temporary exhibitions, including the Institute's centenary year exhibition, which drew her south from her interest in the Arctic to the Antarctic, and the subject of her current research.

Dr Hammant has recently completed a PhD in the anthropology of heritage, studying the impact of museum practice on the interpretation of Antarctic explorers of the 'Heroic Age'.