National Emerging Museum Professionals Network
From 2020 - 2022 I served on the Board of Directors for the National Emerging Museum Professionals Network (NEMPN) as a Regional Director (West) and the Chair of the Advocacy Committee. Notable projects while on the board included: a restructuring and reorganization of the board after a hiatus; drafting a new mission, vision, and values statement as well as a new DEAI commitment; rebranding the organization and launching new merch to generate revenue; relaunching the salary transparency project as an advocacy initiative; and working strategically with a dozen local chapters in the Western USA.
Talks and Presentations
Throughout my career I have given a number of lectures / talks / presentations, some of which were about working in the museum field and some of which were about my basketry research. In 2016 I led an in person workshop on storage mountmaking for the California Association of Museums. In 2020 as a part of the new virtual landscape post-pandemic, I recorded webinars with former colleagues Dominique Alhambra and Ashley Muggli through the Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums on mountmaking and building an online portfolio . In 2021 we repeated the mountmaking presentation for the Texas Association of Museums. Most recently I served as a virtual lecturer on art handling topics for the Art Bridges Collections Care Apprenticeship program.
In 2015 I participated in a course on object-based research methods using museum collections. Over the course of several months I conducted a research project on Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk basketry hats from the Klamath River area in Northern California. This project culminated in presenting my results to the public and to the museum staff in the form of an academic lecture at a research symposium. I later presented a similar version of this talk at a Handweaver's Guild of Boulder meeting in the fall of 2016. I also guest lectured on the topics of
“California Basketry in Indigenous Art History” and “Working with Native North American Material Culture in Museums” while in graduate school. Finally in 2022 I gave a presentation in conversation with Alice Lincoln-Cook about my basketry research in the Mills College Art Museum collections.
Events and Programs
In addition to virtual events I have organized and hosted through NEMPN and my presentations detailed above, I have also worked a little bit in programming in museums. For example, in coordination with the opening of the basketry exhibit I curated, I helped put together a Family Day themed around weaving with the help of the Education staff at the museum. In the fall of 2014 I conducted a semester long program evaluation of the impacts of a museum program called G.A.M.E.S. (Girls At the Museum Exploring Science). The program was designed to have 4th and 5th grade girls interact with female scientists in the museum to encourage participation in the STEM fields at a young age. Finally, as President of the CU Boulder Museum Club, I helped to plan and organize events for students at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. This included coordinating speakers, preparing budgets, securing funding, managing the catering, marketing, creating flyers, and setting up the event.
Conferences
While in graduate school I presented my research and museum work at a number of conferences. In the spring of 2015 I presented a poster at the CWAM (Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums) annual meeting. My poster was called "How Manage Without the Real Thing" and it dealt with the issue of casts/molds and replicas in collections. In the spring of 2016 I presented a hands-on workshop on storage mount building for beginners at the CAM (California Association of Museums) annual conference. Also in the spring of 2016 I presented my master's project research at the CWAM (Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums) annual meeting. In 2018, while working for Axiell Archives, Libraries and Museums as a Sales Consultant, I represented Axiell at the MCN (Museum Computer Network) conference as an exhibitor.
