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.  

In 2009 Janine E. Skerry became curator of metals at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in
Williamsburg, Virginia, where she had previously served since 1993 as curator of ceramics and glass.
Skerry has also been employed at Historic Deerfield, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody
Essex Museum, and the Essex Institute. She holds a BA cum laude from Yale University, an MA from
the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware, and a PhD from
Boston University. She has lectured and written widely on silver, ceramics, and dining in England
and America.

In addition to handling curatorial responsibilities for metals such as silver, fused silver plate,
polished steel, pewter, brass, jewelry, and enamels, Skerry is currently working to expand Colonial
Williamsburg’s collection of early American silver. She is curator of Silver: From Mine to Masterpiece,
an exhibition of English and American silver opening in September 2015 at the Art Museums of
Colonial Williamsburg.

John A. Burrison is a Regents Professor of English and director of the folklore curriculum at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He also is curator of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, which opened in 2006 in Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia. Burrison received his PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. His friendship with north Georgia potter Lanier Meaders led to his research specialty in folk pottery and the first in-depth survey of a southern state’s ceramic traditions, Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery (1983). Burrison’s other books include Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South (2000), the catalog for the permanent folklife exhibition he curated at the Atlanta History Center; Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture (2007); and From Mud to Jug: The Folk Potters and Pottery of Northeast Georgia (2010). Burrison also edited Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South (1991). He served on the Folk Arts Advisory Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts (1984–87) and is a 1987 recipient of the Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities.

Burrison’s lecture venues have included the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress; the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum near Belfast, Northern Ireland; Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany; Peking University in Beijing, China; the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the folklore departments of Indiana University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Annette Blaugrund was director of the National Academy Museum and School (1997–2007) and
previously served as Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator at the New-York Historical Society. She has
also worked as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
She has written eight books—including The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists (1997)—and has contributed to numerous other books. She was named a chevalier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters in 1992 and received a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy in 2008, among other honors. She holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University, where for six years she taught American art and culture. Currently, she sits on the advisory council of Columbia’s art history department, writes and edits art catalogs, lectures, consults with institutions across the country, and is a peer reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums. Blaugrund has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, as well as in Russia and Japan.

Bradley C. Brooks was appointed curator of the Bayou Bend Collection, part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), in December 2014. Before joining the MFAH, he had worked at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) since 2000. At IMA he served as director of programs and operations at Oldfields-Lilly House and Gardens, where he planned and coordinated the reinterpretation of the American country place–era house. Beginning in 2007, Brooks led the initiative for the transition of the Miller House and Garden—a modernist residence declared a National Historic Landmark in 2000—from private ownership to IMA property. From 1995 to 2000, he was director of the McFaddin-Ward House in Beaumont, Texas, and from 1987 to 1995, he served as curator, then director, of the Moody Mansion in Galveston. Brooks earned a BA in communication arts from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an MA in early American culture from the Winterthur Program of the University of Delaware.

Brooks’s work has appeared in The Arts in the American Home, 1890–1930 (1994), Interpreting Historic House Museums (2002), The Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record, and The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

Artist Linda Carter Lefko has been in the historic reproduction and restoration business for the past
forty years. Her specialties include graining, gilding, gold-leaf repair, reverse glass and clock-dial repair, and painted- and decorated-surface restoration. In addition to her work as an artist, author, and restorer, Lefko is an advisor to the Rufus Porter Museum in Bridgton, Maine.

Lefko’s book titles include The Art of Theorem Painting: A History and Complete Instructional Manual, with Barbara Knickerbocker (1994), and Folk Art Murals of the Rufus Porter School: New England Landscapes, 1825–1845, with Jane E. Radcliffe (2011).

Beth Carver Wees is the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she oversees the collections of American silver, jewelry, and
other metalwork. Prior to joining the Metropolitan’s staff in 2000, she was curator of decorative
arts at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Wees lectures
internationally and is the author of numerous articles and books, including English, Irish, and Scottish Silver at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (1997) and Early American Silver in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013). Wees holds degrees in art history from Smith College and the Williams College graduate program in the history of art. An enthusiast for Britain’s historic houses, she is an alumna of the Attingham Institute’s summer school and Royal Collection Studies programs. She also serves on the board of the American Friends of Attingham as secretary. Wees is currently the organizing curator for the Metropolitan’s museum-wide jewelry exhibition, scheduled to open in the fall of 2017.

Ellen Paul Denker is a museum consultant and independent scholar based in western North Carolina. She holds a BA in cultural anthropology from Grinnell College, Iowa, and an MA from the University of Delaware, where she was a fellow in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. 

As a museum consultant, Denker has worked on a variety of exhibition topics, from ceramics and furniture history to visiting nursing and American craft. She has written extensively on American ceramics, the arts and crafts movement, and American home furnishings. Denker’s list of publications as author or co-author is extensive. Recent titles include Faces and Flowers: Painting on Lenox China (2009), From Tabletop to TV Tray: China and Glass in America, 1880–1980 (2000), and Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony (2004). Her article on designers of American parian porcelain statuary, published in Ceramics in America, received the Robert C. Smith Award for best decorative arts article of 2002 from the Decorative Arts Society.

In January of 1994, Thomas C. McGehee left a twelve-year career in banking to oversee the
Bellingrath Home, its archives, and its original collection of nineteenth-century decorative arts.
For two decades he has extensively researched the history of the estate as well as the makers and
provenance of the porcelain, silver, furniture, and glass collected by Bessie Morse Bellingrath between the years 1906 and 1943. 

McGehee’s interest in the decorative arts has been heightened by his participation in numerous programs, including the 1999 Winter Institute at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the London and Newport, Rhode Island, summer schools of the Victorian Society; and the Attingham Institute’s 2008 summer school and 2010 London House course. McGehee was recognized in 1996 by Mobile’s Historic Development Commission for his research on the region’s lost architectural treasures, which appeared in a newspaper series entitled Mobile: Then and Now. His interest in local history has continued with his column, Ask McGehee, which appears each month in Mobile Bay magazine. He is a frequent lecturer in Mobile and has been a regular part of the University of South Alabama’s Road Scholar programs since 1997.

Lydia Blackmore is the decorative arts curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. She earned an MA and certificate in museum studies from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware; she also holds a degree in history from the College of William and Mary. As curator, Blackmore oversees research, acquisition, and preservation of decorative and fine art collections. She manages the Decorative Arts of the Gulf South project and is coordinating preservation projects at the historic 533 Royal Street campus. In eleven years at HNOC, Blackmore has curated or cocurated several exhibitions, including Making Mardi Gras (2022), A Vanishing Bounty (2024), and Unknown Sitters (2024). Outside of HNOC, she is a member of the board of trustees of the Historic BK House & Gardens. 

A graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Philippe Halbert entered the doctoral program in the history of art at Yale University in 2015. He has held a variety of curatorial positions at institutions including the musée du Louvre, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. His doctoral research centers on the decorative arts of early modern Europe and the colonial Americas. He is presently working on his dissertation, which explores the art and material culture of domestic life in early Louisiana and its connections across the wider Atlantic world.

A native of North Carolina, Robert F. Doares lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he is a museum
educator at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Doares has devoted himself to the study of French porcelains and enamels, chiefly those of Paris and Limoges. He has published numerous articles on history and decorative arts, both professionally and independently, in periodicals such as Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Colonial Williamsburg, North Carolina Postal Historian, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Haviland Quarterly, and Glass on Metal magazine. His research on French porcelain has been supported by multiple stipends from the Haviland Collectors Educational Foundation and the American Ceramic Circle. He has given talks to both these groups, as well as to the Henry D. Green Symposium on Decorative Arts at the University of Georgia, the Connecticut Ceramic Study Circle at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, and the 2014 Natchez Antiques Forum. Recognized as a leading expert on the White House state dinner service of President Rutherford B. Hayes, Doares spoke on that subject at Maymont Foundation in Richmond this past March. His most recent article on the Hayes china appeared in the spring 2015 issue of the American Ceramic Circle Journal.

The 2005 release of Doares’s book with Barbara Wood, Old Limoges: Haviland Porcelain Design and Décor 1845–1865—with a foreword by the late John Keefe of the New Orleans Museum of Art—turned scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century French porcelain upside down. Nearly a decade after its publication, Old Limoges continues to influence how curators, collectors, and dealers label and describe unmarked nineteenth-century china.