Bio
I am a museum consultant specializing in interpretive & strategic planning, content & collections curation, institutional capacity building, and igniting the creative process. My holistic approach to museum work has been called slow food, divining, poetry, and a secret weapon.
I have held curatorial positions at the AFL-CIO’s museum, the US Senate’s Office of Senate Curator, and the Bostonian Society, and I taught in the Museum Studies Program at Tufts University. I was a Fulbright Fellow in Helsinki, Finland, and a Community Fellow in the Center for Public History at Brown University.
In 2013 and 2014 I led #BostonBetter, an effort by 25 Boston-area cultural institutions to provide programming commemorating the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing. My work on #BostonBetter and the exhibition Dear Boston: Messages from the Marathon Memorial won awards from the New England Association of Museums and the American Association for State and Local History.
Recent clients include the Frick Pittsburgh, History Cambridge (Cambridge, MA), Musée McCord (Montreal, Canada), the Wilson Museum (Castine, ME), Myseum of Toronto, Mystic Seaport (Mystic, CT), and History Nebraska (Lincoln, NE).
I lead for change on a number of field-wide museum issues, including place-based interpretation, creative practice, collections stewardship, and the impact of museums on lifelong well-being.
My books Creativity in Museum Practice (Routledge, 2013, co-authored with Linda Norris) and Active Collections (Routledge, 2017, co-edited with Trevor Jones and Elee Wood) are essential texts for museum workers in the United States and abroad.
You can find my ideas and opinions in Exhibition, the Journal of Museum Education, and History News, and online at CityStories, Active Collections, and TEDxBoston.
Books
Active Collections, co-edited with Trevor Jones and Elizabeth Wood, Routledge, 2017
Creativity in Museum Practice, co-authored with Linda Norris, Routledge, 2013
Articles
“Developing a Toolkit for Emotion in Museums,” co-authored with Linda Norris, Exhibition, vol. 36 no. 1, Spring 2017
“Objects or People?,” Active Collections, Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones, eds., Routledge, 2017, pp. 21–33
Guest Editor, City Museums and Urban Learning (Themed Issue), Journal of Museum Education, vol. 38, issue 1, Spring 2013
“This Time It’s Personal: City Museums and Contemporary Urban Life,” Ian Jones et al., eds, Our Greatest Artefact: The City, CAMOC, 2012, pp. 45–51
“Do History Museums Still Need Objects?,” History News, American Association for State and Local History, Summer 2011, pp. 19–24
CityStories
From 2010 to 2014 I kept a blog chronicling my research and projects related to city history, city identity, and city museums. You can find the archived posts here.
Speaking
“The Human Museum,” keynote, Marie Malaro Symposium, The George Washington University Museum Studies Program, 2019
Creativity Incubator Reflection, Greater Hudson Heritage Network/New York State Council on the Arts, 2019
“Creative Public Engagement as Conversation,” Longwood Graduate Symposium, Longwood Gardens, 2016
“The Poetry of Objects,” keynote for Why Museums? conference in Aarhus, Denmark, 2015 and for Connecticut League of Historical Organizations conference, 2015
“Our Year of Mourning,” TEDxBoston, 2014
“Museums as Healers,” The Museum Life podcast, 2014
“The Living City: Trends in Urban Curation,” International Museums of Cities symposium, Rio de Janeiro Ministry of Culture, 2012
“How To Build a Better City Museum,” Urban History Exhibited symposium, Den Gamle By, Aarhus, Denmark, 2011
Teaching
For Tufts University’s Museum Studies Graduate Program:
The Meaning of Things: Interpreting Material Culture, seminar on American material culture research and interpretation methods, 2011–2015
Collections Management, core course on registration, collections care, and legal & ethical issues, 2008
Awards
The American Association for State and Local History, 2024 Award of Excellence for “Gilded not Golden,” a new signature tour of Clayton, the Frick Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age mansion
The National Council on Public History, 2020 Book Award for Active Collections
The American Association for State and Local History, 2015 Leadership in History Award for the Dear Boston exhibition
New England Museum Association, 2014 Excellence Award for the #BostonBetter project
The Bostonian Society, 2009 Curtis Guild Leadership Award