Julie Arrison-Bishop, founder of MuseumTastic, loved history from the day in second grade when she dipped candles and put on a colonial dress at Storrowtown Village. Her passion for history and serving the community have made museum life a perfect place to be. You’ll love Julie’s organizational and planning skills and ability to get just about any job done with fantastic results. Julie’s professional experience includes the National Park Service, Historic New England, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and The House of the Seven Gables.
Lori Austin is the secretary and webmaster at the Plainfield Historical Society, taking minutes at monthly meetings, and designing and maintaining social media. Lori recently created a virtual tour of the Shaw Hudson House. She attended several summers of the Emerging America project, leading her to use primary sources with elementary students to research and create a documentary film on the history of the Mohawk Trail. In the summer of 2017 Lori participated in the Library of Congress Summer Teaching Institute, developing history curriculum with teachers from across the country. In 2019 she traveled to Mexico to work with teachers from the US and Mexico on creating curriculum on Mexican culture and natural history. A graduate of the Smith College Ada Comstock program, Lori recently retired from teaching fourth to sixth grade science, and currently teaches STEAM for pre-K through eighth grade.
Margaret Back is a Preservation Associate at the Newport Restoration Foundation. She previously worked as a Preservation Manager for the South Region of Historic New England, where she oversaw preservation projects and facility maintenance for seven diverse historic farms and house museums in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. She holds a master’s degree in Historic Preservation.
Jane Bowers has been working with museums and other cultural collections for thirty years, and has been at the Wenham Museum since 2008. Although she completed her graduate work in art history at UMass Amherst with a focus on modern and contemporary art, most of her jobs have been with historic sites and collections, including a three-year stint at a whaling museum. These experiences have provided an intensive, hands-on course in collections care, material culture, colonial domestic life, and human experience that no school can teach.
Alyson Bull is the sixth grade teacher at Leverett Elementary School in Leverett, Massachusetts. An educator for the last 16 years, she has extensive experience in place-based education. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Education from Mount Holyoke College and a Master’s Degree in Critical Skills Education from Antioch University New England.
Lorna Condon is Senior Curator of Library and Archives at Historic New England. As Senior Curator, she has worked with and expanded the organization’s significant collections of photographs, architectural drawings, manuscripts, and ephemera. In order to share these collections with the public and to raise awareness of them, Lorna has curated exhibitions, overseen grant-funded projects, written books and articles, and lectured frequently. She serves on the boards of the Ephemera Society of America, the Ticknor Society, and the Amesbury Carriage Museum and on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections Committee.
Sally Cragin teaches New England history for Fitchburg State University’s adult education program and is an author for Llewellyn Worldwide. She worked as a professional actor in dinner theater and summer stock as a child. Sally began writing for the Boston Phoenix while still a teenager and won two Penney-Missouri awards for best feature writing. She continued reviewing theater and writing arts pieces for the Boston Globe and Phoenix and many other publications (Boston Herald, St. Louis Riverfront Times) until her election to Fitchburg School Committee in 2007. She was elected as a Councilor-at-Large in 2021 for Fitchburg City Council and currently serves as Chair of Stratton Players.
Charan Devereaux is the curator/producer of “Faith in a City: Exploring Religion in Somerville, Massachusetts,” a project created in partnership with 20 local religious communities and exhibited at the Somerville Museum. Her earlier project, “Union Square at Work: Photographs, Stories and Music from Somerville’s Oldest Commercial District” was also exhibited at the Somerville Museum. A former Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Charan’s projects have received support from Mass Humanities, The Boston Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Somerville Arts Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Passim Iguana Fund.
Thomas L. Doughton is a Senior Lecturer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, where he has taught for 20 years. In scholarship and instructing undergraduates and adult learners, he has specialized in the Holocaust, comparative genocide, Native American studies, local history, and African American history as well as seminars like “Global African Diaspora” and “African Experience in Europe.” A longtime resident of Paris, Professor Doughton did graduate work at the University of Paris completing an advanced degree with a dissertation on the relationship of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and the emergence of post-colonial discourse in Black Africa. On alternate years he has been taking Holy Cross students abroad for a 6-week summer course entitled “History, Memory and the Holocaust in Central Europe” studying and traveling in Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany. He has also led tours on New England’s African American history for adults.
Alison Drasner has served as the Assistant Director at the Somerville Museum since 2018. She has implemented various updates to systems and processes. She has also been actively facilitating existing and new programs to help the Museum ‘jump’ into the 21st century. Alison received a master’s in interior/exhibition Design from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC and has years of experience working with museums and galleries from New York to Washington, DC, and her hometown, Framingham, MA. She has been a proud resident of Somerville since 2011 and an artist with a studio in Vernon Street Studios.
Sheryl Faye is a professional, award winning actress. She graduated with a BFA in Acting from Emerson College. She has been presenting Historical Women for the past 19 years to various organizations across the country. She currently stars in 10 different shows about historical women.
Gayle L. Gifford, MS, ACFRE, is a nationally known consultant, author and trainer with 40 years of experience with nonprofits. Her board consulting is grounded in research, and helps boards to intentionally create their own definition of excellence. Gayle is author of Make your Board Dramatically More Effective, Starting Today and a contributor to four other books for nonprofits. She was co-researcher of Voices of Board Chairs and the recent study “How COVID changed nonprofit board practices” with BWB Solutions. Gayle has consulted with many history and cultural organizations. And, she’s served as staff, volunteer, board member and officer of nonprofits as well.
David Glassberg teaches U.S. cultural, public, and environmental history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and co-edits the “Public Historians in Our Climate Emergency” series for the NCPH blog History@Work. Among his publications are American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990); Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (2001); “The Changing Cape: Using History to Engage Coastal Residents in Community Conversations About Climate Change” (2017) ; “Place, Memory, and Climate Change,” (2014) ; and “Witnessing Climate Change: Toward a Network of Environmental Sites of Conscience,” in Public History in a Changing Climate (2014). He has collaborated with a number of museums and national parks, including the Minnesota Historical Society, Boston Children’s Museum, Pinelands (N.J.) National Reserve, Statue of Liberty National Monument, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Springfield Armory National Historic Site, and Cape Cod National Seashore.
Benjamin Haavik is Historic New England’s Team Leader for Property Care. As Team Leader for Property Care, he is responsible for the preservation and maintenance of all thirty-eight historic properties open to the public. Ben has a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC). Ben started his career working for the Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust and then the Historic House Trust of New York City. During his 18 years at Historic New England, Ben introduced a system for strategic prioritization and management of Historic New England’s properties, spearheaded system-wide initiatives to understand their environmental systems, developed a weatherization and energy efficiency framework, established best practices for house museum security, developed a framework for resiliency in the face of climate change, and is currently engaged in an effort to make Historic New England’s sites accessible.
Meghan Gelardi Holmes is the curator of the Gibson House Museum, where she oversees the care and interpretation of the collections at a small historic house in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. She is also the curator of the Colonial Society of Massacdouhusetts. Meghan currently serves as an Affiliate Editor for History@Work, the blog for the National Council on Public History. She received her master’s in Public History from UMass Amherst.
Katherine Rye Jewell, PhD, is a historian and author of Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century, published by Cambridge University Press (New York) in 2017. A graduate of Vanderbilt University (BA, 2001) and Boston University (MA, 2005; Ph.D., 2010), she studies political and cultural history with a focus on the intersection of culture and politics. She is currently Associate Professor of History at Fitchburg State University where she received the Fitchburg State University Faculty Research Award in 2018. A recent year-long visiting fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute funded her current book project on the history of college radio, under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
Bill Lichtenstein is a print and broadcast journalist and documentary producer. Recipient of more than sixty major journalism honors including a Peabody Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and U.N. Media Award, he worked for seven years producing investigative reports for ABC News and has written for publications including the New York Times, the Nation, the Village Voice, and the Boston Globe. He produced and directed the feature-length documentary, WBCN and the American Revolution and wrote the companion book of the same name (MIT Press). He worked at WBCN from 1971 to 1977, beginning as a teenage volunteer on the station’s “Listener Line.”
Ken Liss has been president of the Brookline Historical Society since 2009. He researches, writes, and gives presentations and walking tours covering many aspects of Brookline’s history. Ken is a retired librarian who most recently served as Head of Instruction at the Boston University Libraries from 2014 to 2021. He had previously served as a librarian at Boston College and the Harvard Business School and at a nonprofit organization and a library software company. He blogs about Brookline history at https://brooklinehistory.blogspot.com and contributes to the website of the Historical Society, http://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org.
Sarah Luria is. She studies the way literature and stories impact our sense of place and relationship to the environment. She is currently at work on a book The Story of My Street, which gives an in-depth tour of the environmental and land use history of the street where she lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Her writings include Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, DC (UNH Press, 2005); (as co-editor) GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text and the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011); “Secret Histories of the Virginia-North Carolina Dividing Line” (Geohumanities 2017); and (with Ricardo Campos), “Greening a PostIndustrial City: Applying keyword extractor methods to monitor a fast-changing environmental narrative” (forthcoming). She recently directed and edited the film Pakachoag; Where the River Bends (2022).
Susan Mareneck, Chair of the Leverett Historical Commission since 2014, is a founding member of the Leverett Sustainable Economy Committee and Friends of the North Leverett Sawmill. As a member of the art faculty at the Spence School and Visual Arts Chair at Convent of the Sacred Heart 91st Street in New York City for 26 years and currently in her professional art practice, history of place figures prominently. After retirement from academia in 2006, Susan served as Executive Director of the Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment (ICARE) based at Union Theological Seminary, New York City and then at Montague Catholic Social Ministries in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Susan lives in and has been educated by a house built by Daniel Graves Sr., a blacksmith, who fought in the American Revolution at age 14.
Jonathan Mirin is an internationally produced playwright, performer, and filmmaker who has frequently turned to local history for inspiration. He co-founded Piti Theatre Company, an award-winning troupe based in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts and Switzerland in 2004. In 2012, he launched Piti’s “Your Town” program with a production focusing on mill history and immigration in Olde Coleraine. He has led residencies and created new work with young people in communities around New England. Jonathan is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He also received a Master’s Degree from Boston University’s Creative Writing Program. Jonathan has led communication workshops for professionals of all kinds for companies like World Education, New York City Public Schools, Community Action, Community Legal Aid, The Leadership Program, Power and Systems and the European Organisation Design Forum. Most recently, he co-founded Hilltown Health, a grassroots organization focused on safe technology and environmental health in Western Massachusetts.
Colin Novick is the Executive Director of the Greater Worcester Land Trust and has been engaged in urban land conservation work since 1996. This work is aided by his expertise in the environmental history of Worcester and the use by Native Americans and later settlers of the region. Colin assisted in the creation of the EOEEA Massachusetts Statewide Trail and Greenway Plan with the Appalachian Mountain Club. Colin served as the chair of the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition and was the first Executive Director of the Bolton Conservation Trust. He frequently presents workshops and seminars at state and national conferences on land conservation.
Christina Pokwatka is a Preservation Manager for Historic New England, the oldest and largest regional heritage organization in the nation. Christina plans and oversees preservation projects and facility maintenance for thirteen historic sites located throughout the North Shore of Massachusetts. She previously was an intern at the Central Park Conservancy as a Conservation Technician. Christina holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Roger Williams University.
Laura Rankin has worked at the Framingham History Center for the past eight years in several capacities. She is currently the Assistant Director and manages the organization’s public programming, education, and social media. Her work focuses on sharing the stories that make up the fabric of Framingham to engage the community and create a sense of pride of place. Laura holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from Framingham State University and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University.
Kaylee Redard, a recent graduate from UMass Boston’s History Master’s program on the Public History track, has been working at The House of the Seven Gables as historical interpreter, visitor services specialist, and assistant visitor services manager. Specializing in public and education programs, Kaylee has welcomed Gables visitors through her virtual programs, demonstrations, and podcasts throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Laidy Saenz is the Art and Culture Assistant at the Somerville Museum. She is originally from Peru and holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. She brings experience in operations management, programming, and research.
Lindiana Semidei is Program Officer at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation. Lindiana is also a dancer, choreographer and director of Raices, a dance company.
Patrice Tiedemann is the Artistic Director of Seaglass Theater Company, founded in 2016 to produce creatively-staged programs of classic vocal repertoire throughout New England. She was the Artistic Director of Charleston Chamber Opera from 2008 to 2013, and has crafted historically-informed productions for museums and foundations from South Carolina to Massachusetts. In October 2021, she served as the dramaturg for Seaglass Theater’s world premiere of Whaling Women, a dramatic cantata by Jodi Goble. As a professional soprano, her highlights include appearing as a soloist with the Boston Pops, Boston Lyric Opera, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Indianapolis Opera, Pioneer Valley Symphony, Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Theatre by the Sea, New Repertory Theater, the New Bedford Symphony, and many others in classical, sacred and theatrical repertoire. A graduate of Indiana University and Rhode Island College, she is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the American Guild of Musical Artists, and Actors Equity Association.
Marieke Van Damme, executive director of History Cambridge, has worked in nonprofits for more than twenty years, starting as an Americorps VISTA volunteer in Alaska. She worked in collections management for the National Park Service in Sitka, Alaska, and in Salem, Massachusetts; managed an 18th-century historic site in Peabody, Massachusetts; and served as deputy director at the Bostonian Society/Old State House in downtown Boston. In 2014, Marieke launched Joyful Museums, a project studying workplace culture in museums, and in 2017, co-founded GEMM (Gender Equity in Museum Movement). Her “spark site” was Erie Canal Village, a reconstructed 19th century settlement in Central New York where she explored historic buildings as a child.
Valerie Zolezzi-Wyndham is the founder and CEO of Promoting Good, LLC. Valerie and her talented team create transformational change and empower leaders and organizations to foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging through two proven frameworks – IGNITE and the Equity Pause™. The firm partners with organizational leaders, boards, and advocates across social good, public and private sectors to IGNITE equity through a proven five-step framework that assesses equity needs, engages stakeholders in deep learning, a readiness process, and the implementation of actionable equity strategies and monitoring with targeted design thinking pivots.