Archives are not neutral containers, they are arguments about what matters and who gets to know it. My archival practice has always been grounded in that conviction: that the work of description, preservation, and access is also an interpretive act, and that building a collection people can actually use is one of the most meaningful things a researcher can do.
A+E Networks / History Channel
Head Archival Producer & Research Lead | A+E Networks / History Channel
In my current role, I direct historical research and primary source stewardship for multiple simultaneous documentary series, overseeing the identification, assessment, cataloging, and licensing of materials held across university libraries, historical societies, and private institutional archives globally. This work involves building and maintaining metadata systems for thousands of assets across distributed teams, negotiating institutional access agreements with international archival partners, and developing documentation protocols for rights management and compliance. It is archival work at production scale with the accountability, precision, and systems-thinking that large collections require.
Finding Aid: Trianon Press Archive (MS 099)
Lead Cataloger & Curator | UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and University Archives
The Trianon Press Archive documents the work of Trianon Press, a small mid-twentieth-century publisher specializing in hand-printed, limited-edition facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts. As lead cataloger and curator, I processed and described this multi-format collection, applying DACS and LCSH standards to produce a full finding aid published to the Online Archive of California, making the collection discoverable and accessible to researchers for the first time.
Finding aid available at: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8th8tht/
Fellowship Archival Research: Historic New Orleans Collection
Diane Woest Fellow in the Arts and Humanities | Historic New Orleans Collection
Awarded the competitive Diane Woest Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities to conduct original archival research at the Historic New Orleans Collection, one of the premier repositories for Louisiana history and culture. The collection I worked with had not yet been fully processed or described. Thus, I became one of its first researchers, working alongside HNOC archivists to help process and describe materials as I moved through them. The scholarship I produced from that collection, subsequently published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, was among the first to draw on those holdings.
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Archival Intern | Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution and one of the world’s most significant ethnomusicological archives, holding over 50,000 tracks documenting folk, world, children’s, and documentary music traditions across cultures and decades. As an archival intern throughout my undergraduate years, I supported the full collections processing workflow: physically handling and preserving recordings and media objects, cataloging and creating metadata for analog materials across multiple formats, digitizing audio and preserving accompanying liner notes and printed ephemera, and conducting listening and logging sessions to support description and access.
WHPK 88.5 FM, University of Chicago
Music Director & Archivist | WHPK 88.5 FM, University of Chicago
WHPK maintains one of Chicago’s significant independent radio archives. It is a physical collection of records, CDs, and media materials accumulated over decades of freeform broadcasting. I contributed to the cataloging, accessioning, and reorganization of that collection, helping to bring order and access to holdings that had grown faster than their documentation. Alongside that archival work, I hosted a weekly program built around original curatorial concepts, each episode dedicated to a distinct genre or theme featuring music made by women.
Alternative Press Center
Associate Editor & Indexer | Alternative Press Center
The Alternative Press Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing access to alternative and radical media. As associate editor and indexer, I systematically cataloged and indexed the full annual run of publications received by the organization, building comprehensive yearly catalogs across a large and diverse periodical collection. That indexing work was published in the Alternative Press Index, Vols. 42, Nos. 2–3, making the holdings discoverable to researchers and readers beyond the organization’s immediate community.
Girls Rock Chicago
Volunteer Archivist & Curriculum Developer | Girls Rock Chicago
Girls Rock Chicago is a nonprofit youth music education organization. Recognizing that the organization had no systematic record of its own history or materials, I founded and built its media archive from the ground up, establishing a zine library with acquisition, organization, and access systems where none previously existed. I also developed an original zine-based curriculum covering all instrument classes, creating accessible instructional materials that could be reproduced and used across program years.