Senior Administrative Coordinator, Administration

Photo: Dennis Keeley.

Raised in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, Sue Fuller started college at Stanford University but transferred to Cornell a year later, when her family moved to New Jersey. There she studied English literature and met her husband Pete, a student at the university's school of hotel administration. They were married a year after college, and he went to work for the Sheraton Corporation, managing hotels in cities such as Washington, Providence, and Chicago.

In the late 1960s, she returned to California when her husband was transferred west. They lived for nearly a decade in San Diego, then later came to Los Angeles. When her youngest child graduated from high school in 1983, she took her first job since college, working for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. Assigned to the ticketing department, she found the work a great experience. She stayed on after the games to help close the operation, leaving in the fall of 1984.

When Ms. Fuller inquired about positions at the Getty Museum—a place where she had long wanted to work—she was told of an opening at the newly formed Getty Conservation Institute. Hired as the secretary to the Institute's administrative services manager, she was the GCI's ninth employee. In that first year she provided staff support during the design of the Marina del Rey facility, which was to become the Institute's home for over a decade.

In the years that followed, she moved from secretarial work to accounting and personnel. Today she continues to back up the administrative support for the GCI's programs. Now the Institute's third-longest-serving staff member, she finds it enormously satisfying to have witnessed the growth of the GCI and the fulfillment of so much of the vision that prompted its establishment. A particular highlight for her was a 1991 trip to Egypt and a visit to the tomb of Queen Nefertari, site of the Institute's first special project. After processing so much of the project's paperwork, she found it gratifying to stand in the tomb and see conservation work actually being done.