Jennifer Atwood currently manages the programs and services of the MCC’s Local Cultural Council Program. This is one of the largest grassroots programs of its kind in the United States. The LCC Program distributes over $3 million to 329 local cultural councils annually to support programming in the arts, interpretive sciences, and humanities for the purpose of providing cultural access to all segments of the state’s population. Prior to joining the MCC, Jennifer worked for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and the Pittsburgh Public Theater. She has a Masters of Arts Management degree from Carnegie Mellon University and was previously a freelance stage manager for independent theater companies in San Francisco and surrounding bay area.
Jeannette A. Bastian is a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College where she directs their Archives Management concentration and their satellite campus in Western Massachusetts. Formerly Territorial Librarian of the United States Virgin Islands from1987 to 1998, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999. She is widely published in the archival literature and her books include West Indian Literature, A Critical Index, 1930-1975 (1982), Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003), Archival Internships (2008), Community Archives, The Shaping of Memory, ed. with Ben Alexander (2009), and Archives in Libraries: What Librarians and Archivists Need to Know to Work Together, with Megan Sniffin-Marinoff and Donna Webber (2015).
Jane Becker manages the internship programs and community partnership initiatives for the public history graduate track at UMass Boston, where she also teaches public history. She received her PhD in American Studies from Boston University, and has worked in exhibition and program planning and as a historian for a wide range of museums and public humanities endeavors in New England. This spring Jane took on the role of Massachusetts team leader for AASLH’s Leadership in History Awards, rejuvenating her passion for supporting the history endeavors of local organizations and communities
Monika Bernotas is a former Fulbright Scholar and current Research Associate at ConsultEcon, Inc., a firm offering economic and management consulting services to a number of museums, and other institutions in the area of travel and tourism. She also serves as co-chair of the New England Museum Association’s Young and Emerging Professionals affinity group, and is pursuing her MBA at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She is active on Twitter and can be reached @MonikaBernotas.
Tom Blake has been working at the Boston Public Library as their Digital Imaging Production Manager and Digital Projects Manager since 2005. He is currently responsible for the creation of beautiful, versatile, and sustainable digital objects for all BPL digital initiatives. Since 2010, he has managed an ambitious project to help digitize collections from across Massachusetts in conjunction with Digital Commonwealth, a statewide repository service, and as a pilot Service Hub of the Digital Public Library of America. Tom came to the BPL from the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he was involved in several digital projects including the online version of the diaries of John Quincy Adams. He also served as a photographer and imaging specialist for nine years at Boston Photo Imaging and as an archives assistant at the MIT Special Collections and Archives. Tom holds a BFA in Professional Photographic Illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MS in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons College.
Pleun Bouricius is the Director of Grants and Programs at Mass Humanities, where she has worked since 2007. Pleun is responsible for the grant program; guides grant applicants through the application process; and also manages the Massachusetts History programs and projects. She holds a PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University, where she taught American history, American literature, and women’s studies.
Lucinda A. Brockway is the Program Director for Cultural Resources at The Trustees of Reservations. The Trustees are responsible for more than 100 properties and 25,000 acres of Massachusetts cultural, natural and scenic landscape. Brockway ran her own firm, Past Designs (Kennebunk ME) for twenty five years before joining The Trustees. The firm specializes in the preservation and design of a number of public and private commissions. She is the author of two books, A Favorite Place of Resort for Strangers (Fort Ticonderoga 2001), and Gardens of the New Republic (May 2004). Her work has been featured in Old House Journal, Victoria Magazine, Colonial Homes, Nineteenth Century and Accent as well as innumerable professional and trade publications. She serves on the Board of Governors for the Decorative Arts Trust and is an instructor for the National Preservation Institute (Alexandria VA). Her work has been recognized by the Garden Club of America, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Preservation League of New York State, the State of New Jersey, the Massachusetts Historic Commission and many others.
Steve Bromage is the Executive Director of Maine Historical Society (MHS). He joined MHS in 2001 and has served as director since 2012. MHS, founded in 1822, is a private non-profit that promotes the preservation of and engagement with Maine history throughout Maine. Steve’s leadership focuses on institutional change, the evolution of the historical field, collaboration, and the development of forward-looking non-profit management models. Among other initiatives, Steve has led the development of the Maine Memory Network, a nationally-recognized digital museum that features online contributions from more than 270 organizations across Maine. Prior to joining MHS, Steve helped found the online Disability History Museum and produce the award-winning NPR documentary Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project. He also worked in publishing in New York. Steve has an M.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and received his B.A. from the University of Richmond.
Kenneth Brooke has been teaching History at Needham High School since 2002. He currently teaches World History to freshmen and sophomores, and teachers an interdisciplinary class, the Greater Boston Project, to seniors. He is the school National History Day coordinator and is an enthusiastic advocate of the project. He has judged at the regional, state and national competitions. He also runs the Needham-Shanghai exchange, coaches tennis and is co-advisor to the Academic Bowl club. A transplant from England, he enjoys travelling with his family, playing soccer, tennis and reading.
Michelle Chiles is the Research Center Coordinator for the Rhode Island Historical Society, where she manages patron research services and the centralized reading room for the society’s collections. She holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science with an Archives Management concentration from Simmons College (2013). Prior to her position at the RIHS Michelle was the archivist for the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, as the first, designated archivist for the 200-year-old performing arts organization. An active member of the New England Archivists (NEA), Michelle currently serves as a Steering Committee member of the Local History Roundtable and is part of the Susan Von Salis Student Meeting and Travel Scholarship Committee.
Rob Cox, a recovering paleontologist, one time molecular biologist, errant poet, and sometime historian and archivist, has worked as Head of Special Collections at UMass Amherst. In a checkered career before arriving in Amherst in 2004, Cox held positions at the University of Michigan (where he received his PhD in history) and the American Philosophical Society, getting infected along the way with an interest in the histories of religion and science. He has written on topics ranging from talking to the dead in the nineteenth to the plants of the Lewis and Clark expedition and Quaker relations with the Seneca nation in the 1790s. His most recent work includes a trilogy of books on New England culinary history and, quite separately, the history of sleep.
Marta Crilly is the Archivist for Reference and Outreach at the Boston City Archives. She holds an M.S. in Library Science and an M.A. in History, both from Simmons College. Her work interests include outreach to under-served user communities, effective social media outreach, and cross-institutional collaborations. Past presentations include “Narrowing the Focus of Digital and Social Media Outreach” at the Society of American Archives Conference and “Things They Didn’t Teach Me in Library School: Outreach on Shoestring,” “Archives and Active Learning,” and “Turning Your Genealogists into Archives Genies: User Instruction with Genealogists,” all at New England Archivists’ conferences.
Holly Ewald is a visual artist who has blended studio work and community engagement for close to 40 years. Since moving to Rhode Island 1997 her socially engaged work has increasingly been with communities that inhabit and treasure under-recognized public spaces. Since 2008 she has focused on the urban ponds of Providence, founding and directing the organization UPP Arts upparts.org . A nonprofit since 2014, its mission is to engage artists and communities in public art-making for the purpose of celebrating and building stewardship of our shared environment. Ewald has received numerous awards in recognition of her art and community engagement work, including the Tom Roberts Prize for Creative Achievement in the Humanities from the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities, an Honor Award from the Tomaquag Museum, the Environmental Achievement Award from Save the Bay and the Education Award from the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission.
Robert Forrant is a University of Massachusetts Lowell Professor of History, specializing in labor, immigration, and industrial history. Coordinator of the University’s history M.A. program, he is author of several books and articles, including The Great Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 (2014), The Big Move: Immigrant Voices from a Mill City (2011), and Metal Fatigue: American Bosch and the Demise of Metalworking in the Connecticut River Valley (2009). A board member of the Lawrence History Center and 2015 recipient of the Massachusetts Endowment for the Humanities History Commendation, he’s been a scholar on several Mass Humanities-funded projects and National Endowment for the Humanities projects over the years.
Pamela W. Fox, a retired preservation consultant, has served as president of the Weston Historical Society since 2005. She is the author of two books: Farm Town to Suburb: The History and Architecture of Weston, Massachusetts, 1830 to 1980 (2002) and North Shore Boston: Houses of Essex County (2005).
David Glassberg teaches U.S. cultural, public, and environmental history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among his publications are American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990), and Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (2001). He has also collaborated with a number of museums and national parks, including the W.E.B. Du Bois National Historical Site, the Statue of Liberty National Monument, Minnesota Historical Society, Boston Children’s Museum, Pinelands (N.J.) National Reserve, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Springfield Armory National Historical Site, and the Cape Cod National Seashore.
Carolyn M. Goldstein is Public History and Community Archives Program Manager in the University Archives & Special Collections Department, Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston. She coordinates the Mass. Memories Road Show, a state-wide digital history project that documents people, places and events in Massachusetts history through family photographs and stories. She is the author of Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th Century America (1998) and Creating Consumers: Home Economists in 20th Century America (2012). She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Delaware.
Jayne Gordon is a local historian and independent consultant. Her recent and current work includes projects for Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area, the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, the Concord Museum, Boston National Historical Park, Strawbery Banke Museum, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Jayne previously served as Director of Education and Public Programs at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and as Executive Director of both the Thoreau Society and the Alcotts’ Orchard House. She has been the Director of Education and Interpretation at the Concord Museum and the Thoreau Institute/Walden Woods Project. A resident of Concord, she regularly teaches and lectures about aspects of the town’s history and trains the town guides. She is on the boards of the Robbins House (African American historical site in Concord) and the Friends of Minute Man National Park.
Jenny Gotwals is Lead Archivist at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Before joining the Library in 2007, she worked at the New-York Historical Society and the Woody Guthrie Archives. For the last several years she has led Wikipedia edit-a-thons for diverse groups of students, academics, independent researchers, and the general public. She is committed to eliminating the gender and racial gaps in Wikipedia’s editors and entries.
Eva Grizzard provides preservation guidance for public and private organizations through needs assessments, site visits, and inquiries from institutions and private clients. She presents workshops and webinars on a variety of formats and subjects, including audiovisual materials, environmental monitoring, and care and handling of archival collections. Eva’s experience as a fine artist and fabricator supports her interests in collection development, access for special collections, and the history of art and design. She earned an MSLIS, with concentrations in Rare Books and Manuscripts and Special Collections, as well as an Advanced Certificate in Archives and Records Management, from the Palmer School at Long Island University.
Desiree Demski-Hamelin first volunteered with Freedom’s Way Heritage Association in 2014 during her year of AmeriCorps service with the Massachusetts Land Initiative for Tomorrow (MassLIFT). She has since been interning at Freedom’s Way as part of her graduate studies. Desiree’s first project was to coordinate the 2016 Connecting Communities Along Our Trails program by collaborating with existing and potential partners across the forty-five-community National Heritage Area. Desiree holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science from UMass Amherst, where she is currently enrolled in a dual-degree master’s program for regional planning and public policy and administration, and is pursuing a certificate in cultural landscape management. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Ashburnham Conservation Trust, which works to protect the natural heritage of her hometown.
Annie C. Harris is the CEO of Essex Heritage, the non-profit, management agent for the Essex National Heritage Area. Essex Heritage’s mission is to preserve and enhance the heritage area’s significant historic, natural and cultural resources. Annie was a founding member of Essex Heritage and vocal proponent for the creation of the Essex National Heritage Area which includes 34 communities on the north shore of Boston and lower Merrimack River Valley. Annie serves in several national leadership positions including the Chair of the Alliance of National Heritage Areas in Washington, DC, and she has been a member of the National Park System Advisory Board’s Planning Committee. Annie is active in many civic and community organizations, serving on the City of Salem Zoning Board of Appeals and the Salem Harbor Plan Committee. Annie and her husband are avid sailors and long-time members of the Corinthian Yacht Club, Marblehead, MA where Annie is currently the Rear Commodore.
Stephanie Hebert has worked in collections management for thirteen years and joined the American Textile History Museum’s staff in 2006 after working in an historic house museum. As ATHM’s Registrar, she is responsible for tracking the movement of collections objects, overseeing loan and gift documentation, making shipping arrangements, database administration, and assisting with installation and de-installation of ATHM’s temporary and traveling exhibitions. She has worked on numerous grant-funded projects, all of which focused on retrofitting storage spaces, rehousing collections, and performing inventories. From 2011 to 2014, Stephanie was a frequent guest lecturer for Tufts University’s collections management class. She holds a bachelor’s degree in classical studies from Calvin College, a certificate in museum studies and a master’s degree in history and museum studies from Tufts University.
Karen Herbaugh has worked at the American Textile History Museum for over 20 years; much of that time as the curator of the textiles, clothing and pre-industrial machinery collections. She has grown and refined the costume collection since its inception to over 6,500 objects, as well as written several successful collection care storage grants. Karen is an active member of the Costume Society of America having been involved as a grant reviewer, symposium abstract reviewer and a regional board member. Her research interests are Sino-Japanese influence on Western dress, 1890s neon textile designs, Associated American Artists’ designs from the 1950s, and fabric diaries. She most recently helped curate, Art for Every Home, Associated American Artists, 1934-2000, a traveling exhibition currently at the Grey Gallery at NYU in New York City. Her essay on the AAA fabrics is included in the exhibition catalogue.
Nick Houlahan is Taxonomy Team Leader at EBSCO Information Services (EIS). He works with eleven Taxonomists to drive projects on EIS’s controlled vocabularies and authority metadata records specific to media, company, and biography database products. Recently, he has been involved in the creation of EIS’s metathesaurus that lies at the heart of the Enhanced Subject Precision (ESP) initiative to improve results within the EDS federated search experience. In addition to taxonomies, Nick’s budding interests include digital humanities, scholarly communication, and information retrieval. Nick is enrolled in Simmons College’s MLIS degree with a concentration in Information Science and Technology. In the Fall 2015 semester, he helped create the Blanche Castleman Link Digital Scrapbook for a digital libraries class using Omeka’s open source software.
Lorraine James began library work as a Student Assistant at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Libraries over 35 years ago. She became a full-time employee after graduating and worked in both the Music Library and the Information Processing Department. She learned book repair from her predecessor and by attending workshops around New England. She became the library’s Book Repair Coordinator in 2003. Lorraine maintains the library’s general circulating collection by performing in-house repairs and coordinating monographic shipments to a commercial binder. She also educates staff on proper book handling and makes custom enclosures for materials in the library’s Special Collections and University Archives.
Veronica Martzahl is the Electronic Records Archivist at the Massachusetts Archives, responsible for the implementation of a new Archival Collections Management System (ACMS) and Digital Preservation Repository. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives and a Master of History from Simmons College and is a member of the Society of American Archivist, New England Archivists, and the Academy of Certified Archivists. She is active in the Council of State Archivists, co-chairing the State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI), and is the Deputy Coordinator for the Massachusetts State Historical Records Advisory Board.
Cliff McCarthy is the President of the Pioneer Valley History Network, a not-for-profit consortium of historical institutions and individuals in Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. He is the Archivist at the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History and at the Stone House Museum in Belchertown. Cliff is the author or co-author of several books on the history of Belchertown and he writes occasionally for his local newspaper. He comes to his passion for history after a career in the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution.
Jim McGrath is a postdoctoral fellow in Digital Public Humanities at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. He is the former Project Director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, a community project hosted by Northeastern University. His research interests include digital humanities, public history, and new media. He is on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.
Abbye Meyer is a program officer at Mass Humanities. Abbye guides grant applicants through the application process and manages the Family Adventures in Reading program. She has a PhD in English from the University of Connecticut, an MPhil in American Studies from the University of Glasgow, and an AB in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College.
Marla Miller directs the Public History Program in the History Department at UMass Amherst, where she teaches courses in Public History, American Material Culture, Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and Writing Beyond the Academy; she also oversees students as they secure and complete internships in Massachusetts and beyond. A consultant with a wide variety of museums and historic sites, Miller also guides students in the team-based field service projects that are the foundation of the UMass program’s pedagogy. Miller also serves as series editor for the UMass Press book series “Public History in Historical Perspective.” [https://www.umass.edu/umpress/series/public-history-historical-perspective]
Michelle Montalbano is a MLIS candidate at Simmons College in Boston. Prior to starting the program, she worked in the publishing industry in New York, and in her spare time, she is still a writing tutor, editor, and literary consultant. Michelle currently works at The Digital Ark, a digital imaging studio in Providence, RI, and has lent her skills to Brown University, the MFA, and the Newport Historical Society. She is especially interested in digital humanities projects and re-envisioning the roles played by cultural heritage institutions with regard to social justice, art, outreach, and access. She was the Chair of the Systems Administration committee for the Blanche Castleman Link Digital Scrapbook, which was built using the open source platform Omeka, and she received her B.A. in Literature and Religious Studies from Marlboro College in Vermont.
Anna Newman has an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a B.A. in Italian Language and Literature from Smith College. She currently splits her time between the Boston Public Library, where she is a member of the “metadata mob,” and Harvard Medical School, where she is the Research Data Manager Intern. She also volunteers for the Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee, a nonprofit organization that plans educational programming for elementary, middle, and high school students around local history and social justice issues. Her interests include digital scholarship, data management, and open access.
Rachel Onuf is Roving Archivist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a job that allows her to roam the state, assisting smaller repositories with institutional assessments and hands-on training. She has done similar work as a consultant, conducting collection surveys and assessments and teaching workshops on preservation planning, local history collections, and collection inventory & assessment. Rachel is an adjunct professor for the Simmons School of Library and Information Science at the Mount Holyoke campus. Over the past twelve years, she has taught the introductory foundations course, preservation management, and archives courses. Rachel also worked as an archives analyst for the second phase of the Archivists’ Toolkit project and co-taught AT training workshops, including SAA’s Implementing DACS in Integrated CMS: Using the Archivists’ Toolkit. Most recently, she has been involved in developing training materials for ArchivesSpace and co-teaching ASpace workshops.
Mary Sellner Orr has been designing and producing communication materials for over 20 years. She worked for numerous companies before establishing Orr Studio on Cape Cod in 1995. Clients have included museums, schools, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses. Projects have ranged from brochures to exhibition designs and reflect the individual needs of each client. A portfolio can be viewed at orrstudioonline.com. Mary is a native of Minnesota. She received a B.A in art education from the College of St. Benedict with continuing studies at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Bruce Reinholdt has worked in museums for more than forty years. Prior to his arrival in Connecticut in 2000 Bruce worked for 25 years at the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown, NY. Over the past 16 years Bruce was curator of the Gunn Historical Museum in Washington, CT; served as public historian for two Teaching American History grants at Central Connecticut State University; and is currently program assistant to Connecticut History Day, sponsored by Connecticut’s Old State House in Hartford, CT. He has been active in the Connecticut League of History Organizations for 16 years and currently serves as President of the Board. Bruce holds a Master’s degree in History Museum Studies from the State University College, Oneonta, NY.
Alli Rico is an independent museum professional located in Boston. She holds a master’s in Museum Studies from the Harvard University Extension School, currently sits on the Collections Committee at the Cambridge Historical Society, and is a co-chair of the New England Museum Association’s Young and Emerging Professionals affinity group. In addition to intern advocacy, Alli is interested in exploring the digital realm to help museums tell the stories behind their objects and collections, in order to reach and connect with a global audience. She is active on Twitter and can be reached @alli_rico.
Tom Scheinfeldt is Associate Professor in the Departments of Digital Media & Design and History at the University of Connecticut. Tom is also Director of the University of Connecticut’s Scholarly Communications Design Studio, which is dedicated to developing collaboration-first approaches to the multimodal creation and expression of knowledge. Formerly Managing Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Tom has directed several award-winning digital humanities projects, including THATCamp, Omeka, and the September 11 Digital Archive. Trained as an historian of science and public historian with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford, Tom has written and lectured extensively about the history of museums and the role of history in culture. Among his publications, Tom is a recent contributor to Debates in Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press) and co-editor of Hacking the Academy (University of Michigan Press). Tom blogs about digital humanities and the business of digital humanities at Found History and co-hosts the Digital Campus podcast will his colleagues Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Mills Kelly, and Stephen Robertson. You can follow Tom on Twitter (@foundhistory) and LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomscheinfeldt/).
Olivia Searcy is a Boston-based museum educator who received her Master of Science in Museum Education from Bank Street. Presently, she is Education Coordinator for the Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, MA, where she developed the current school and outreach programs focusing on northern enslavement. Additionally, she teaches at the Otis House for Historic New England. Formerly, Olivia held the Education Manager position at Philipsburg Manor, a living history museum in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Other organizations Olivia has worked for include the Brooklyn Historical Society, The Brooklyn Children’s Museum and the Denver Botanic Gardens. She hails from New York City and is a food enthusiast, music lover and all around museum geek.
Elizabeth G. Shapiro is the Executive Director of the Connecticut League of History Organizations, an organization that works to build the capacity of those organizations that collect, preserve and interpret Connecticut’s histories. She is the co-creator of Working with Scott Wands of Connecticut Humanities, she has envisioned, designed and presented the StEPs-CT program, an integrated program of training, mentoring, and grant funding that since 2012 has helped forty-seven Connecticut cultural organizations build professionalism and remain vibrant community resources. She holds an MA from the Cooperstown Graduate Program in History Museum Studies, and prior to working at CLHO spent 20 years as Executive Director the Sharon Historical Society, in Sharon, CT. Liz serves on the Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, the advisory boards of the Connecticut Digital Archive and Connecticut History Illustrated, and the State of Connecticut’s WWI Centennial Commemoration Committee. In her spare time Liz works as a consultant to nonprofits on issues of governance and strategic thinking. She is also a Peer Advisor for Nonprofits for the State of Connecticut.
Greta Kuriger Suiter is a Collections Archivist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute Archives and Special Collections. She has a Master’s degree in Art History from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Greta has been actively editing Wikipedia for the past couple of years and has co-hosted multiple edit-a-thons at the MIT Libraries.
Elizabeth Thomsen is the Member Services Manager for NOBLE, the North of Boston Library Exchange, and the current President of the Digital Commonwealth.
Will Twombly is the founder and principal of Spokeshave Design, (Watertown, MA). His museum career began by chance, during a delightful visit to the Museum of Transportation in 1970. After ten exciting years of on-the-job training as Keeper of Collections and Head of Operations, he moved on to the Quincy Historical Society, working on public programs and exhibitions. Spokeshave Design was established in 1984, and since then has provided exhibition planning, design, and fabrication services to many small and mid-size museums, historical societies, and libraries throughout New England. Will remains grateful for getting paid for having so much fun, and especially for all the wonderful dedicated, visionary people he has been privileged to work with over the years.
Mark Vassar is a Lead Archivist at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where he works with collections documenting the history of women in the United States and the culinary arts. He is also outgoing Resident Archivist at the Cambridge Historical Society, where he has served for the past 15 years. He holds an MA in education from the University of New Haven and an MLIS in Library and Information Sciences from Simmons College with a focus on archival management. Prior to working at the Schlesinger Library, he worked with colonial and joint legislative committee records at the Massachusetts Archives.
Jessica Venlet currently works as the Library Fellow for Digital Archives at the MIT Libraries Institute Archives and Special Collections. She earned a Master of Science in Information degree from the University of Michigan. She is interested in web archiving, acquisition of and access to born-digital collections, and testing emerging archives and digital preservation technologies. Jessica started actively editing Wikipedia in 2015 and enjoys contributing articles and information about notable women.
Liz Vizza has been Executive Director of the Friends of the Public Garden for seven years. In this position, she has overseen the parks care, enhancement and advocacy work that the Friends has partnered with the City of Boston on since 1970. Prior to her leadership of the Friends, Liz worked as a landscape designer and planner for close to 30 years, focusing on revitalization of urban open space and historic landscapes. Her projects include master plans for Franklin Park, Mass. Audubon’s Boston Nature Center, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, and Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury. Many of her projects received local and national awards. She facilitated public processes for park renovations including Titus Sparrow Park in Boston’s South End and Christopher Columbus Park in the North End, and was project manager for the first comprehensive park inventory of open space for Boston’s 1986 Open Space Plan.
Bill Wallace is celebrating forty years as Executive Director of Worcester Historical Museum, which has expanded and relocated under his directorship. A native of Northern New Hampshire, he is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire. In addition to his day-to-day responsibilities at 30 Elm Street and Salisbury Mansion, he is on the Board of the Worcester Cultural Coalition and chair of the Hope Cemetery Commission. When not interacting with Worcester history, he can probably be found in a cemetery, researching the mid-19th century history of Mt. Washington’s Tip-Top House, or spending time at a Disney property.
Scott Wands serves as Manager of Grants and Programs at Connecticut Humanities (CTH). He manages CTH’s non-grant-funded services to Connecticut’s cultural community and oversees the $135,000 Quick Grant program. He is co-creator of StEPs-CT, an integrated program of training, mentoring, and grant funding that since 2012 has helped forty-seven Connecticut cultural organizations build professionalism and remain vibrant community resources. StEPs-CT is based on the “Standards and Excellence Program for History Organizations” (StEPs), a national model curriculum developed by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). Connecticut Humanities has added a series of hands-on workshops, expert mentors who are on call to help with the rough spots and a competitive granting fund to support projects related to the program. The StEPs-CT program is the first in the nation to implement the StEPs curriculum on a statewide level.
Matt Wilson is the Executive Director of MASSCreative, the statewide advocacy voice for the arts, cultural, and creative community in Massachusetts. In three years, MASSCreative has grown to more than 400 organizational members with 22,000 individuals taking part in public education and advocacy actions. Since 2013, MASSCreative’s campaigns have helped lead to $33.5 million of new operational and capital investment into the Commonwealth’s creative community. MASSCreative’s coordinated the Create the Vote coalition that injected the issues of arts and culture into the 2013 Boston Mayoral race, the 2014 Massachusetts Gubernatorial campaign, and several mayoral races across the Commonwealth in 2015. Prior to MASSCreative, Wilson led campaigns for a cleaner environment, affordable and accessible health care, to fight corporate power, and to elect progressive government leaders. Wilson graduated from Dartmouth College in 1983 and also earned a Masters of Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2008.
Nina Zannieri has been the Executive Director of the Paul Revere Memorial Association in Boston, MA since 1986. She is currently completing a multi-year expansion project and $4M capital campaign. Previously, she was Curator at the Rhode Island Historical Society. Ms. Zannieri served as Vice Chair of the AAM from 2002-2003 and on the board from 1999 – 2003. She served as President of NEMA from 1998 – 2002 after service on the Board from 1988-1996 and 1997-2002. She served on the AASLH Council and is currently Chair of the Ethics and Professional Standards Committee. She currently sits on the board of the Freedom Trail Foundation and is also involved with several North End community groups. Ms. Zannieri is a frequent guest lecturer for the museum studies programs at the Harvard and Tufts University. In 2015 she received a NEMA Lifetime Achievement Award. She has a BA in history from Boston College and an MA in Anthropology/Museum Studies from Brown University.
Sally Zimmerman (Boston University, MA, Historic Preservation, 1981; Mount Holyoke College, BA cum laude, American History, 1975) is Senior Preservation Services Manager at Historic New England, staffing the Historic Homeowner Program. Ms. Zimmerman worked for many years as a preservation planner at the Cambridge Historical Commission, where her work focused on neighborhood conservation districts, an innovative alternative to traditional local historic districts. She has also worked at the Massachusetts Historical Commission, as a member of the reconnaissance survey teams, as preservation planner, and as director of the Preservation Planning division. She is author of numerous landmark and neighborhood conservation district study reports and National Register nominations, as well a guide for homeowners and preservation commissions on historically appropriate exterior paint colors. She frequently writes and lectures on energy conservation strategies for older and historic homes.