Associate Project Specialist, Field Projects
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Lori grew up near Boston, the youngest of seven children. While the rest of her siblings gravitated toward medicine, engineering, and business, she was drawn to the arts.
At Wellesley College outside of Boston, Lori studied art history and fine arts. During one summer break, while visiting a sister in Switzerland, she saw conservators at work in Lausanne Cathedral and concluded that this was the sort of work that she wanted to do.
After graduating from Wellesley in 1994, she enrolled at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London to study wall paintings conservation. While there, she worked on a number of field projects in Cyprus, Ibiza, and England. She quickly realized how much she loved the challenges and adventure of fieldwork. After finishing at the Courtauld, she spent three years living in Europe and working on wall painting sites in palaces, theaters, and churches in Austria, the United Kingdom, Malta, and elsewhere. The projects she worked on were wide-ranging in scope but also involved focused research in the area of documentation; this included working on and participating in GRADOC—a symposium on Graphic Documentation Systems for Mural Paintings—held in Rome at ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) in 1999.
Deciding that she wanted to return to the United States, she moved to New York City in 2000, where she continued as a freelance conservator while also working for a small graphic design firm. The following year she spent several months as a wall paintings consultant on the GCI's project in Cave 85 at the Mogao Grottoes in China. In January 2002 she joined the Institute.
Her time at the GCI has reconfirmed her career choice. She has enjoyed not only being part of the Cave 85 project but also being involved in the China Principles project activities at Mogao and at the Chengde Imperial Mountain Resort, where her work on painted surfaces on wooden architecture at Shuxiang Temple has been especially gratifying. She has also been part of the GCI's Organic Materials in Wall Paintings project, working with noninvasive examination techniques on wall painting sites in Italy. She is looking forward to conducting wall paintings conservation training in Egypt in 2007, as part of the Institute's Valley of the Queens project.