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.  

Linda Eaton is the John L. and Marjorie P. McGraw Director of Collections and Senior Curator of Textiles at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. She also teaches in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and the Winterthur / University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. After completing graduate work at the Conservation Center and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she worked as a textile conservator in Scotland. Since joining the staff of Winterthur, Eaton has curated a number of exhibitions, including Quilts in a Material World (accompanied by a book with the same title), Needles and Haystacks: Pastoral Imagery in American Needlework, With Cunning Needle: Four Centuries of Embroidery, and The Diligent Needle: Instrument of Profit, Pleasure, and Ornament. She worked with historian Marla Miller to curate Betsy Ross: The Life behind the Legend and served as co-curator of the recent exhibition Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes. Her most recent book, Printed Textiles: British and American Cottons and Linens, 1700–1850, was published in September 2014.

Eugene D. Cizek is professor emeritus of architecture and preservation studies at the Tulane School of Architecture. He received master’s degrees in city planning and urban design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an MIT Fellow and Sears Fellow. He went on to earn two doctorates—a doctor of engineering in city planning as a Fulbright Scholar from the Delft Institute of Technology and an interdisciplinary PhD in environmental social psychology from Tulane University. A Louisiana licensed architect since 1964, Cizek has been involved with numerous projects, including Destrehan, Laura, and Lombard Plantations, as well as historic urban structures such as Sun Oak in historic Faubourg Marigny, the Marchand-Didier House, and the Pitot House. He has received numerous local, state, national, and international awards, and has been published in a variety of national magazines and journals, including Colonial Homes, Old House Interiors, and Guide to New Orleans Architecture. Actively involved in several conservation and preservation groups, Cizek is the founder and first president of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, a founding board member of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, and a founder and member of the New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission.

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 New Orleans native, Leslie Lambour Bouterie is a career educator, history enthusiast, professional artist, and self-avowed ceramics addict. In Washington, DC, she worked in the field of museum education and interpretation at the National Museum of Women in the Arts; Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens; and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Now living in Charlottesville, Virginia, she serves as an education and public-engagement volunteer at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Monroe’s Highland, and James Madison’s Montpelier. As an independent ceramics researcher, Bouterie serves the archaeology department at Montpelier by identifying and analyzing ceramic artifacts and assists the curatorial department with collection acquisitions. Bouterie is a member of the American Ceramic Circle, the Spode Society, and the Society for Historical Archaeology, and she serves as a board member, editor, and researcher for the Transferware Collectors Club. She was the 2007 recipient of the Adjutor Hominum award from Loyola University New Orleans, her alma mater. She has written articles for numerous publications and speaks about British ceramics at national and international conferences.

Alexandra A. Kirtley is the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A native of Baltimore, Kirtley received her master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture (now American Material Culture). Since joining the staff of the museum in 2001, Kirtley has orchestrated numerous acquisitions and curated several exhibitions, including the retrospective Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris and Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House, which she co-curated with Peggy A. Olley, the museum’s associate conservator of furniture and woodwork. Kirtley is currently writing the first catalogue of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s early American furniture collection, set to be published in 2020. Kirtley has published her research in American Furniture, Ceramics in America, and The Magazine Antiques, as well as several books. She serves on the curatorial advisory board of the US Senate’s Commission on Art; is a trustee of the Andalusia Foundation, which oversees the Biddle family’s Delaware River estate; and is a member of the board of governors of the Decorative Arts Trust.

Tyler Rudd Putman is the gallery education manager at the Museum of the American Revolution and a PhD candidate in the history of American civilization program at the University of Delaware. He received an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture in 2011 and has worked as an archaeologist and a tailor. Putman has published articles about everyday clothing, shipwrecks, and living history. In 2014, he sailed aboard the nineteenth-century wooden whaleship Charles W. Morgan and aboard the tall ship SSV Corwith Cramer across the Atlantic Ocean.

Ashley Hlebinsky is the Robert W. Woodruff Curator of the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, where she manages over eight thousand firearms, dating from the 1200s through the modern day. She received an MA in American history and museum studies from the University of Delaware, and, prior to joining the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, she researched in the Smithsonian Institution’s national firearms collection. Hlebinsky serves as a firearms consultant for museums, an expert witness, a freelance writer, a firearms instructor, a lecturer, an on-camera firearms historian, and a television producer. In 2017, she received the Grits Gresham Shooting Sports Communicator of the Year Award, presented by the Professional Outdoor Media Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and was named one of the Wyoming Business Report’s Top 40 under the Age of 40.

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. 

Natalie Larson is a textile historian and owner of Historic Textile Reproductions. She holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Maine and worked as an archaeologist in Arizona and Virginia before joining the department of collections at Colonial Williamsburg, where she researched and made reproduction furnishing textiles for twenty years. Concurrently, she served as a historictextiles consultant for more than ninety museums, from Maine to Florida, including the homes of seven presidents, three state capitols, and numerous National Park Service sites. She has lectured at dozens of museums and universities and recently received the Samuel Gaillard Stoney Conservation Craftsmanship Award from the Historic Charleston Foundation. Larson is currently researching a catalog of American furnishing textiles.

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.