Selene G. Phillips, Wabigonikewikwe, is a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe nation in Wisconsin. The assistant professor teaches writing at the University of Louisville.

Her Ph.D. is from Purdue University, and her dissertation is about Indigenous epistemology and native ways of understanding and interpreting Sacagawea. She received a master’s degree from Indiana University’s School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from Purdue University, with a double major in science and sports movement, as well as radio and television. Her interests focus on Native American studies, First Amendment issues, and communication law.

Phillips performs Chautauquas as Sacagawea; Mary Todd Lincoln; Chickasaw tribal leader and pilot Eula “Pearl” Carter Scott; and Yankton activist and author Zitkála-Šá, Red Bird or Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. In 2025, she performed Zitkála-Šá for the Oklahoma Chautauqua; Leeds, England; the Lower Brule reservation and the St. Joseph's Indian School in South Dakota.

Phillips’ poetry “blood land” responds to Wynton Marsalis’s ode to “Calling the Indians Out” and was selected for an edition of Jelly Bucket, Special Section: Indigenous Voices, published by Eastern Kentucky University in July of 2022.

Her work “What I Want” was published in The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation in 2019. An article on her and her poems “tar paper shack,” “waaswaaganing,” and “Ojibwe Cousin Quilt” appeared in the September 2018 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine. She won the International Women Who Write poetry contest with her “i miss Lac du Flambeau” and appeared in the 2013 edition of Calliope.

Other publications include “Zitkála-Šá” in Anything Goes: America in the Roaring Twenties and “Eula ‘Pearl’ Carter Scott” in American Aviation: Barnstorming to Mach 1, for the Oklahoma Chautauqua Reader, Oklahoma Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2023 and 2025.

Her article with colleagues Scott Sanders and Cecelia Alexander, ‘Native’ Advertising: An Evaluation of Nike’s N7 Social Media Campaign, won the top paper in the American Studies division of the National Communication Association and appears in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.

Other publications include ‘Indians on our Warpath:’ WWII Images of American Indians in Life Magazine, 1937 – 1949 and appears in American Indians and the Media. Surviving Cultural Suppression: Sharing and Transferring Ojibwe Identity in Lac du Flambeau appears in From Generation to Generation: Maintaining Cultural Identity Over Time. Sacagawea: Super Hero, Super Woman, Super Myth, appears in American Indians and Popular Culture: Media, Sports, and Politics.

She is a former director of Louisville’s Women Who Write and a Commissioner for UofL’s Commission on Diversity and Racial Equality. She serves on the Indiana University School of Journalism Alumni Association Survey Board and was a contributing editor to Lafayette’s Community Times. She mentored UNITY Journalists of Color, Inc. program and served on the Lafayette YWCA board of directors. She served as the president of the American Native Press Archives National Advisory Board at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and on Indiana Governor Frank O’Bannon’s Native American Council.