Director of Curatorial Services
Meadow Brook Hall

I am the Director of Curatorial Services at Meadow Brook Hall, the greatest extant example of Tudor-Revival architecture and the 4th largest museum house in the country, and, in my opinion, the historical and architectural gem of Oakland County. I am responsible for the estate's 75,000 collection items (ranging from costumes to automobiles to blueprints), the tours and exhibits, and educational programming.

Since starting at MBH as a volunteer in 2009 (while working 2-3 other jobs), I have lived and breathed for this estate and the family and staff that once lived here. Though I came here because I fell in love with the history of English country homes while studying abroad in London, I am proud to say that my interests have diversified and I'm now considered an important speaker (and proponent) for the history of Oakland University and one of the foremost experts on the history of Dodge Brothers Motor Car Company. I often help at Detroit History Tours & Club events and the running joke is that no matter what the topic is, I'll connect it to Meadow Brook and the Dodge family somehow. The time I have spent helping there has actually helped Meadow Brook, as many guests on those tours now come here to find out more about our history.

I'm also proud that my dedication and passion have helped raise funds to restore Meadow Brook to how it looked when the family lived here. As a self-sustaining museum on Oakland University's campus, Meadow Brook Hall does not often have the funds to conserve the 75,000 objects within it. In 2015, I launched the Adopt-an-Artifact program, which allows friends and organizations to "adopt" the conservation, restoration or replication of specific collection items. In 2015, through these independent donations, we raised $7,140. Additional grants, fundraisers, and the support of the Matilda R. Wilson Fund allowed us to restore both the Breakfast Room and the Sun Porch to their 1929 appearances. The all-encompassingrestoration of both rooms was enormously well-received at a "reveal" party with the adopting sponsors. In 2016, we decided to restore the Library. The response was almost three times greater, with a total of$20,241 donated; this allowed us to break away from some of the independent fundraisers we had used the year before. The success of this program will allow us to continue restoring Meadow Brook Hall, artifact-by-artifact. We have continued on with Frances' bedroom and playroom, the six-room, 3/4 scale playhouse Knole Cottage, and with the walls of The Hall in our Lost Painting Project, which seeks to replicate and rehang the art that was sold or bequeathed after Matilda Wilson's death and conserve what is still here.

I have developed a series of tours and exhibits that help share our history and bring guests, including an annual Downton Abbey program and a permanent exhibit on the history of the Dodge Brothers Motor Car Company for its centennial in 2014. We have started collecting cars for the future Dodge museum, and I now manage ten historic vehicles.

I'm a huge believer in preservation, but I also actively work to modernize the museum experience to make it work for our visitors. I really enjoy working closely with my colleagues to create a synergy between what I do (which can be seen as boring, stuffy, or even always saying "no!" to visitors) and the public events they host that help us keep our doors open. It's a double-edged sword, because hosting events here increases wear and tear, but they are necessary for our operations and they are great for our community. From the beginning, Meadow Brook Hall was intended to be a home for fundraisers, dances, garden events and huge parties, so why not appreciate that guests are able to experience our history firsthand by attending a party or wedding here? The idea for the Adopt-an-Artifact program actually came from seeing wedding photos: though most brides are married right outside of the Breakfast Room, the silk curtains inside were so threadbare that no one wanted photos of this very special moment. Because I didn't have the funds to have new drapes made, I had to come up with a solution for it.

The same kind of thinking led to the also-successful Adopt-a-Dodge program. After we started our Dodge Brothers exhibit, I was able to get many cars donated or loaned to us, but I simultaneously saw the drain on my small budget. The Adopt-a-Dodge allows the public to adopt a car for one year for $750, and receive public recognition, a photo shoot in their car, and the chance to learn to drive their historic vehicle. This simultaneously helps me get more people trained to drive the cars for community events.

I am incredibly lucky to have this position, and stay so close to my family in Lake Orion, and want to help other students on that path. I actively work to work with local high school and university students, host classrooms (we've had OU photography classes take photos behind the scenes, history classes spend their full semester here, and theater classes learn to handle historic textiles and research interior design in our archives), and train interns in their fields. In Fall 2017, a Rochester High School senior who was interested in pursuing architecture had an out-of-classroom internship with me. I took her on field trips and introduced her to conservators in the area, and she learned to do basic conservation on pieces in our collection. We had such a great time that she ended up staying with me through the summer of 2018 and she is now pursuing an architecture and historic preservation degree at Lawrence Tech.

I have developed partnerships with the Detroit Institute of Arts, most significantly when we undertook the conservation (and accompanying documentary) of our Murillo painting. Since then, I have successfully bid for us to be the Oakland County location of their exhibit outreach program for their Bitter/Sweet Exhibit in 2016-2017, have been a location for Inside/Out, and have twice welcomed their DIA Away exhibit truck. I am actively working with the DIA to create new opportunities for collaboration, particularly in our education department.

The information presented here was accurate as of January 1, 2019.