In 2021, Tom Savage was appointed director of educational travel and conferences for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, following a sixteen-year career at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library as director of museum affairs and director of external affairs. From 1998 to 2005, he was senior vice president and director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where he directed Sotheby’s American Arts Course, and from 1981 to 1998 he served as curator and director of museums of the Historic Charleston Foundation. A native of Virginia, Savage received a BA in art history from the College of William and Mary and a master’s degree in history museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. Savage currently serves on the board of governors of the Decorative Arts Trust. He is a former trustee of the Royal Oak Foundation, the Attingham Summer School, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation. In addition, he served as a presidential appointee to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House from 1993 to 2002.

A New Orleans native, John H. Lawrence was responsible for building the extensive photographic holdings at HNOC, where he worked for 46 years before retiring as director of museum programs at the end of 2020. As HNOC’s head of curatorial collections, Lawrence oversaw holdings numbering more than half a million items. He has written and lectured widely about contemporary and historic photography and about the administration and preservation of pictorial collections, and he has curated dozens of exhibitions on a wide range of photographic, artistic, and general historical topics. His latest publication is the HNOC book Louisiana Lens: Photographs from the Historic New Orleans Collection.  

Daniel Kurt Ackermann is associate curator at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. At MESDA he has curated a wide range of exhibitions, including Our Spirited Ancestors: The Decorative Art of Drink and “Black and White All Mix’ d Together”: The Hidden Legacy of Enslaved
Craftsmen. His articles have appeared in The Magazine Antiques and Antiques and Fine Arts.

Before joining MESDA, Ackermann held the Tiffany and Co. Foundation Curatorial Internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ackermann is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of “New Stories from Familiar Objects: Discovering the African American Imprint on Southern Decorative Arts at MESDA,” in Homebound: The Sixth Henry D. Green Symposium of the Decorative Arts (Georgia Museum of Art and University of Georgia Press, 2014) and “Expressing the Sacred Within the Secular: Architecture and the Jewish Communities of Willemstad, Curacao, and Newport, Rhode Island,” in New England and the Caribbean: Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Boston University Press, 2012).

Ralph Pokluda, an antique clock expert and appraiser for the popular PBS program Antiques Roadshow, is president of Chappell Jordan Clock Galleries, in Houston. His interest in horology—
the art and science of measuring time—began in high school, when he was given a family clock that needed repair. He later apprenticed at Chappell Jordan, honing his skills, and purchased its repair department after graduating from college. He now owns the business with Jeff Zuspan, a former apprentice of his. Pokluda is involved with several museum boards and is a frequent
lecturer, at locations across the country, in the field of horology. He is a fellow in the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC) and has held numerous positions, both locally and nationally, within that organization. He and his wife, Carolyn, have two children.

Margaret Beck Pritchard is senior curator and curator of prints, maps, and wallpaper at Colonial Williamsburg, a position she has held since 1981. In 1978 Pritchard received a fellowship at Colonial Williamsburg to assist with the refurnishing of the Governor’s Palace. Pritchard’s curatorial responsibilities include selecting appropriate prints, maps, and wallpaper to hang on the walls of buildings in the historic district. She also creates rotating exhibitions of the graphic collections for the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg.

Pritchard has authored and contributed to a number of publications relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century graphics. Her most recent publication was a comprehensive catalog of the map collection at Colonial Williamsburg, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2002). She has also published books and essays on William Byrd II, English natural-history artists Mark Catesby and George Edwards, cartographers and naturalists working out of Philadelphia, and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century wall treatments.

Pritchard serves on the board of trustees of Old Salem and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the board of governors for the Decorative Arts Trust, and the advisory board of James Madison’s Montpelier. She also chairs the board of trustees of the Williamsburg Community Foundation.

Robert Hunter has over thirty-five years of professional experience in prehistoric and historical archaeology. He has an MA in anthropology from the College of William and Mary. Since 2001, he
has been editor of the annual journal Ceramics in America, published by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Hunter lectures widely and participates in the New York Ceramics and Glass Fair in January each year. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, he has written for other ceramic publications including The Magazine Antiques, The Catalogue of Antiques and Fine Art, New England Antiques Journal, Early American Life, Ceramic Review, Studio Potter, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Pottery Making Illustrated, Kerameiki Techni, and the Journal of Archaeological Science. He is an elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a board member of the American Ceramic Circle, and on the advisory board of the online ceramic publication CFile Daily.

Estill Curtis Pennington, a native Kentuckian, has been actively involved in the study of painting in the South for the past thirty years. He has served in curatorial capacities for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art; he was founding curator of the Morris Museum of Art’s southern collection. 

His publications include William Edward West, 1788–1857: Kentucky Painter (Smithsonian, 1985); Look Away: Reality and Sentiment in Southern Art (Peachtree, 1989); Downriver: Currents of Style in Louisiana Art, 1800–1950 (New Orleans Museum of Art/Pelican, 1991); and A Southern Collection (Morris Museum of Art, 1996). Two of his recent publications, Kentucky: The Master Painters from the Frontier Era to the Great Depression (Cane Ridge, 2008) and Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802–1920 (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), received awards of merit from the Kentucky Historical Society. 

Pennington, who lives in Bourbon County, Kentucky, is the coeditor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Art and Architecture (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). He is currently working on a critical biography and catalogue raisonné of Matthew Harris Jouett.

Merikay Waldvogel, a nationally known quilt authority, lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. Raised and educated in the Midwest, she moved to the South in 1977. Her interest in collecting quilts led her to record oral histories of southern women and to document their quilts. She wrote Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930 (Rutledge Hill, 1986) with Bets Ramsey, based on their statewide quilt search. Her other books include Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression (Rutledge Hill, 1990); Patchwork Souvenirs of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair (Rutledge Hill, 1993); and Southern Quilts: Surviving Relics of the Civil War (Rutledge Hill, 1998). She has curated quilt exhibits, lectures widely, and writes for quilting magazines. She has served on the board of directors of the American Quilt Study Group and the Alliance for American Quilts. She was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in July 2009.

Waldvogel has a BA in French from Monmouth College and an MA in linguistics from the University of Michigan. She taught English as a second language in Chicago public schools and at the University of Tennessee.

Stephen Harrison is the curator of decorative art and design at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he is responsible for a diverse collection of ceramics, glass, metalwork, and furniture representing Europe and America from 1500 to the present. Harrison joined the museum in 2005 and has worked on numerous exhibitions, publications, and projects, including the complete redesign and reinstallation of the museum’s decorative-arts collection. 

Before coming to Cleveland, Harrison was the curator of decorative arts at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He has also held curatorial positions in New Orleans and Dallas. He has written and lectured widely on the subject of nineteenth- and twentieth-century decorative arts, one recent example being his award-winning exhibition and catalog Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique (Yale University Press, 2008). Some of his other publications include Studio Glass in Focus: Dialogue and Innovation (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2012), which he coauthored with Robert Coby, and “Modernity Revealed,” in Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Skira Rizzoli, 2012). 

Harrison is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he was a Jefferson Scholar. He has also earned a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware.

John T. Magill, curator and historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, was born in New Orleans and brought up in California. He received a master’s degree in history from the University of New Orleans and has been employed at the Historic New Orleans Collection since 1982. His studies have focused on the urban history, growth, and physical infrastructure of New Orleans, subjects about which he has written and lectured extensively. He has also written about the city’s social and economic history, including subjects as diverse as banking, the coffee industry, and Carnival season. Books to which Magill has contributed include Charting Louisiana: 500 Years of Maps (HNOC, 2003) and Marie Adrien Persac: Louisiana Artist (Louisiana State University Press, 2000); with Peggy Scott Laborde, he has cowritten Canal Street: New Orleans’ Great Wide Way (Pelican, 2006) and Christmas in New Orleans (Pelican, 2009). He regularly contributes articles concerning the city’s urban and economic growth to Louisiana Cultural Vistas, New Orleans magazine, and Preservation in Print.

Laurie Ossman joined the Preservation Society of Newport County in 2013 as director of museum affairs, overseeing curatorial, conservation, research, and educational initiatives at its eleven historic properties (seven of them National Historic Landmarks).

Ossman previously served as director of Woodlawn Plantation and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House in Alexandria, Virginia; deputy director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami; chief curator at the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach; and curator and restoration project manager for Ca’ d’Zan, the Ringling mansion in Sarasota, Florida. In addition, she was guest curator of the Maryland Historical Society’s Looking for Liberty state history overview exhibition and has held research positions at the Smithsonian Institution, Monticello, and the Office of the Curator at the White House.

Ossman earned her PhD in architectural history from the University of Virginia, and her books include Carrere and Hastings: The Masterworks (2011), with Heather Ewing, Great Houses of the South (2010), and The Gentleman’s Farm (2016).