Curating

From 2020 to 2021, I served as Lead Curator for the exhibit “Community in a Time of Crisis: Yale, New Haven, and HIV/AIDS, 1981-1996” at the Yale School of Medicine, under the auspices of the Program for Art in Public Spaces. This exhibit documents the brave and compassionate work of Yale University and New Haven community members who fought HIV/AIDS and its attendant stigmas during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, through clinical treatments, activism, local outreach, and caregiving. The exhibit opened in March of 2021. You can view the exhibit in person at 333 Cedar Street in New Haven, Connecticut, view the accompanying digital exhibit, take a virtual tour (narrated by me), or watch the digital opening for the exhibit, featuring remarks by individuals who are featured in the exhibit for their work with people with AIDS. I was also interviewed about “Community in a Time of Crisis” for Yale Medicine magazine.

In 2018, I worked as a Graduate Curatorial Associate under Yale Professor Paola Bertucci on the exhibit “The Early Modern Pharmacy: Drugs, Recipes, and Apothecaries, 1500-1800.” This exhibit showcased rare books and objects related to drugs, food, and the apothecary’s art in early modern Europe, and featured contributions from sixteen Yale College students. The exhibit was on display at the John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University from April to July of 2018. You can read more about the exhibit here and here. I was also interviewed about “The Early Modern Pharmacy” for Yale News.

In 2016, I co-curated “Gilded Age Glamour: Fashions from the Bartow-Pell Collection” at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum with Claire McRee, Assistant Curator at the Allentown Art Museum. “Gilded Age Glamour” featured historic men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing and accessories from the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum’s collection, and placed them in the context of social and sartorial changes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. The exhibit was on display from February to April of 2016. You can read more about this exhibit here, here and here.

From 2011 to 2014, I worked as a graduate student researcher and curatorial assistant for two exhibits at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, New York. The first, “Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935,” was on display from April to August of 2013. You can read more about this exhibit here. The second, “Carrying Coca: 1,500 Years of Andean Chuspas,” was on display from April to August of 2014. You can read more about this exhibit here.

From 2020 to 2021 I worked as a graduate research assistant at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, in the division of History of Science & Technology (HST). I worked with the HST’s curator and collections manager in planning for the redesign of the HST galleries, including researching objects, conducting archival research, and organizing focus groups.

From 2018 to 2020 I worked as an archives assistant in Yale University’s Manuscripts & Archives division, under the supervision of the university archivist. My work was supported by the 50/Women at Yale/150 Project, dedicated to the telling the history of women at Yale University. With colleagues I created two library subject guides to aid researchers interested in this history: one dedicated to the history of coeducation in Yale College, and another on the broader history of women at Yale.

In 2016 and 2017 I worked as a Mellon Curatorial Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art, in the Division of Rare Books and Manuscripts. I worked on a wide range of projects, including researching and cataloging cartes de visite photographs, writing labels for a display of nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs, and organizing and rehousing a collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century textiles.

In 2022 I was invited to contribute an oral testimony to The Call of Things, an ongoing work by artist Jessica Houston that “uses ‘talking objects’ to address colonialism, geopolitics and the environmental distress of the North and South Poles.” You can listen to my contribution here. The Call of Things will be exhibited next at the Environmental Design Library at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023.

Artist Regan Rosburg and I created Terra Nullius, an art installation exploring the roles of gender in work, geographic exploration and knowledge-making, and environmental exploitation, c. 1920 and 2020. This piece was exhibited as part of “Dearly Disillusioned,” a multi-artist exhibition commemorating the centennial of U.S. women’s suffrage at the McNichols Civic Center in Denver, Colorado. It was on display from January to April of 2020. You can read more about our work and “Dearly Disillusioned” here, here, and here.

From 2008 to 2015, I worked in the Department of Textile Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, first as Assistant for Administration, and later promoted to Assistant Administrator. I provided professional administrative support to staff of twenty-one conservators and over thirty visiting scholars; assisted staff with archival research and editing; managed a departmental library of over 2,600 books and 1,000 periodicals; coordinated a three-day symposium on tapestry conservation; and administered departmental operating budget and department budgets for fifteen textile-related exhibitions.