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.  

Ramsay H. Slugg is a managing director of the national wealth planning strategies group at US
Trust. Previously, he held leadership roles in Bank of America’s philanthropic management group,
charitable management services group, and wealth management consulting group. Slugg has also served as an adjunct professor at Texas Christian University and Texas A&M College of Law. He is a frequent speaker on tax and financial planning topics, especially as they relate to art and collectibles, and is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Barron’s, and other business publications. He is the author of the Handbook of Practical Planning for Art Collectors and Their Advisors (2015), published by the American Bar Association. Slugg is admitted to practice law in Texas. He currently serves as co-chair of the American Bar Association’s real property trust and estate law art and collectibles committee, as well as in several other leadership positions. Mr. Slugg received his JD from the Ohio State University College of Law and his undergraduate degree from Wittenberg University.

Dr. Jack Holden is a passionate collector and student of Louisiana’s material culture. He is a retired pathologist and brings a scientific eye as well as aesthetic appreciation to the study of Louisiana’s material artifacts and ways. The culmination of his work is Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian
Furniture, 1735–1835, published by The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2010. He has also written numerous articles on the furniture and has given lectures on the furniture, architecture, and gardens of Louisiana. He and his wife have restored several early buildings and display their collection in context with the architecture of those structures.

Jason T. Busch is director of Jason Jacques Gallery in New York. He has two decades of experience in the arts, serving as curator of decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Minneapolis Institute of Art, chief curator at Carnegie Museum of Art, deputy director at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and division director for decorative arts at Sotheby’s. Busch received his MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware and a BA in American studies from Miami University. He was a 2013 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York. A contributor to The Magazine Antiques and Antiques and Fine Art, Busch has also curated groundbreaking exhibitions on decorative arts and authored the associated publications, including Carnegie Museum of Art: Decorative Arts and Design Collection Highlights (2009); Currents of Change: Art and Life Along the Mississippi River, 1850–1861 (2004); and Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (2012).

Judith H. Bonner, senior curator and curator of art for the Historic New Orleans Collection, has
written extensively about the art of the South, with a focus on Louisiana. For more than twenty years she compiled a bibliography on southern art and architecture for the Southern Quarterly, also serving on its advisory board, and for thirty years she has been a contributing editor of the New Orleans Art Review. Bonner has taught at Xavier University of Louisiana and the United States Air Force Academy. Her most recent book is the Art and Architecture volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2013), which she co-edited and to which she contributed thirty-eight entries. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including a two-part exhibition titled Women Artists in Louisiana, 1822–1965: A Place of Their Own, held at HNOC and the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) in 2009. In 1987 she curated the Newcomb College Centennial Exhibition, held at NOMA. She co-curated A Most Significant Gift: The Laura Simon Nelson Collection, on view through November 2 at HNOC, which includes twenty-four pieces of Newcomb pottery. She also authored the foreword for sculptor Angela Gregory’s memoir of her studies in Paris, soon to be released by the University of South Carolina Press for its Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South series.

Garth Clark is a leading scholar and critic on modern and contemporary ceramics art, with over
eighty books to his credit, including the first book on Ohr, The Mad Potter of Biloxi: The Art and Life of George E. Ohr (1989), which won the coveted George Wittenborn Award from the Art Libraries Association of North America. He has received numerous honors, awards, and honorary doctorates, including the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art journalism from the College Art Association. He was also made fellow and member of the court of the Royal College of Art in London. Clark currently is the chief editor of CFile Daily, a cutting-edge online journal that reaches 75,000 people a week in over 196 countries. In November 2017 an exhibition he is curating, Regarding George Ohr: Contemporary Ceramics in the Spirit of the Mad Potter, opens at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

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. 

Nick Powers is a native of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and became interested in the history and material culture of the region at a young age. He completed his undergraduate work at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he majored in history and minored in historical
archaeology. In 2014 he graduated from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. He is a three-time graduate of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Summer Institute. He was also a 2013 participant in the Classical Institute of the South summer fellowship, now part of The Historic New Orleans Collection. Powers is currently the curator of collections at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. There he oversees, researches, and exhibits the museum’s collection of fine and decorative art, as well as the comprehensive collection of museum benefactor Julian Wood Glass Jr. (1910–1992).

Sarah Duggan is the project manager of the Decorative Arts of the Gulf South (DAGS) project at the Historic New Orleans Collection, an initiative that documents and shares information about pre-1865 material life in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She leads DAGS’s work through data management, cataloging fieldwork, archival research, and two internship programs. In 2021 she co-curated the exhibition Pieces of History: Ten Years of Decorative Arts Field Work. Duggan holds a master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of a Delaware, and a bachelor’s in history and religious studies from the College of William and Mary.

Matthew A. Thurlow is the executive director of the Decorative Arts Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting education, preservation, and scholarship related to the decorative arts.

William Keyse Rudolph is the Andrew W. Mellon Chief Curator and the Marie and Hugh Halff
Curator of American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He previously served as a curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art. His exhibitions as organizing curator/co-curator include Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Collection of Roberta and Richard Huber; Nelson Rockefeller’s Picassos: Tapestries Commissioned for Kykuit; Thomas Sully: Painted Performance; In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre–Civil War New Orleans; Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist; and Charles Sheeler’s “Power” Series. His publications include Treasures of American and English Painting and Decorative Arts: From the Julian Wood Glass Jr. Collection (2011) and Vaudechamp in New Orleans (2007). Rudolph earned a PhD from Bryn Mawr College. He was a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators from 2010 to 2016.

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.