Held in Trust Steering Committee

Héctor J. Berdecía-Hernández, MS, Assoc. AIA (He/him) is an Architectural Conservator, an Architect-in-Training, and Director-General of the Escuela Taller de Conservación y Restauración del Patrimonio Histórico de Puerto Rico at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. The institution provides training on traditional building trades and seeks to advance the scientific research on historic building materials, technologies, and conservation practices for architectural heritage in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region. In his current role, he oversees all academic and research projects at the Escuela Taller. Héctor is also a Lecturer in Preservation Technology at the Graduate Program in Architectural Conservation and Rehabilitation at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR).

His research focuses on the conservation of historic buildings and sites, with emphasis on vernacular construction, technical and analytical understandings of traditional building materials and technologies in the Caribbean region, 20th-century modern heritage, and issues related to preservation policy and sustainable development.

He currently serves as Co-Communications Officer of the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network (ECPN) Board of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC). Héctor is a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites -ICOMOS International Scientific Committees on Education/Training and 20th Century Modern Heritage, and a member of the Association for Preservation Technology International (APTI) Technical Committees on 20th Century Modern Heritage & Materials. He was also elected to the College of Young Practitioners of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU).

Héctor holds an M.S. in Historic Preservation, specializing in Architectural Conservation from the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded The Anthony Nicholas Brady Garvan Award for an Outstanding Thesis in Architectural Conservation, and the Elizabeth Greene Wiley Award for Outstanding Promise. He also received an B.EnvD. in Environmental Design-Architecture with a double major in History of the Americas from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. He also studied Conservation Science courses within Georgetown University and the Universitá degli Studi di Firenze. Awards include the Charles E. Peterson Award from The Carpenters' Company of the City and County of Philadelphia, 2018 AIA Puerto Rico Chapter's Honor Award, the 2019 George B. Tatum Fellowship from the Philadelphia Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Gonick Architectural Conservation Fund Fellowship.

Francesca Casadio is the founder of the scientific research laboratory at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she currently holds the post of Associate Vice President and Grainger Executive Director of Conservation and Science.  In this capacity she leads a team of over thirty specialists for objects, paintings, frames, works on paper, photographs, books, other printed materials, textiles, time-based media, and scientific research.  Francesca is also the founding member and co-director of the Northwestern University / Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS). Francesca received her PhD and MS degrees in Chemistry from the University of Milan, Italy and in 2019 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne University in Paris. Casadio has authored several publications in the scientific and conservation literature, including edited books and essays in museum catalogs. She’s passionate about communicating the work of conservators and scientists to the public, students, and the media. In 2006 she was the recipient of the L’Oréal Art and Science of Color Silver Prize.

In both her academic and museum work Francesca is particularly proud of training women scientists for careers in museums, industry and academia. Of the few dozen graduate- and post-doctoral students co-mentored by her at Nortwestern University more than 80% are women. She is a firm believer in leveraging the emotional power of art to inspire younger generations, and hopefully more women, to enter science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) research fields. Francesca is equally proud of compliments for her scientific research in the arts, as for her Italian shoes.

Isra El-Beshir has 11 years of rich experience in the domains of education, cultural arts management, and community engagement. Isra is currently the Associate Director of Museums at Washington and Lee University overseeing the Reeves Museum of Ceramics, Watson Galleries, and Chapel Museum. She was formerly the founding Director of the Illinois Art Station, a startup visual art community center for Illinois State University, and development consultant for Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, a premier African American journal currently housed at Illinois State University. She also served as the Curator of Education and Public Programming at the Arab American National Museum. Isra obtained an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology and BBA in International Business and Arabic from Grand Valley State University.

Margaret Holben Ellis is the Eugene Thaw Professor of Paper Conservation Emerita at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she teaches the conservation treatment of prints and drawings and technical connoisseurship for art historians. She has published and lectured on artists ranging from Raphael, Dürer, and Titian to Pollock, Samaras, Lichtenstein, and Dubuffet. Her research on artists’ materials and techniques is also broad, encompassing Day-Glo colors, Magic Markers, and Crayola crayons, and, most recently, pre-machine-made European papers.

Alison Gilchrest is the inaugural Director of Applied Research and Outreach at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH).  In this role, she facilitates sustained research and training partnerships between IPCH and communities of practice, with an emphasis on collaborations outside of North America and Europe.  Prior to arriving at Yale, Alison was Program Officer for Arts and Cultural Heritage at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where she stewarded the largest US-based grant program focused on the art historical, curatorial, scholarly research, art conservation, and the heritage science domains.  For nearly two decades, she has led national and international initiatives to make progress on issues such as diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion across art museums and art conservation, cultures of museum knowledge management, Native and Indigenous cultural heritage, art of Africa and its diasporas, academic museum and library collaboration, scholarship and preservation of time-based media and contemporary art, financial literacy and emergency preparedness for cultural non-profits, and object-based humanities curriculum in higher education.  She also led a pivotal research effort to understand the scope, impact, and financial implications of 50 years of endowment funding across the museum sector. An enthusiastic generalist by specialty, Ms. Gilchrest has previously held research and technical positions in art history and conservation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds an AB in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and an MSIS in Museum Information Systems from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science. She currently serves on the boards of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) in Philadelphia, PA; and Voices In Contemporary Art (VoCA.network).

Debra (Debbie) Hess Norris is Chair of the University of Delaware (UD) Department of Art Conservation, Director of the Winterthur/UD Program in Art Conservation, and Professor of Photograph Conservation She graduated with a BA degree in chemistry, art history, and studio art (1977) and MS in conservation (1980) from UD. Since 1985, Norris has authored more than 45 articles/ book chapters on the care t of photographic materials, emergency response, ethics, advocacy, and conservation education; and taught 160+ workshops and seminars worldwide. With Jennifer Jae Gutierrez, she co-edited – Issues in the Conservation of Photographs – published by the Getty Conservation Institute (2010).

Norris was the chair of Heritage Preservation (2003-08) and president of the American Institute for the Conservation (1993-97). She has served as president of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts Board (CCAHA), US UNESCO commissioner, and project director of The Andrew W. Mellon Collaborative Workshops in Photograph Conservation. Norris co-led the Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative (MEPPI) with the Arab Image Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Conservation Institute. With Nora Kennedy, Bertrand Lavedrine, and other colleagues she launched a photograph preservation training initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa. Norris helped to develop the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage (IICAH) in Erbil, Iraq, now led by the Smithsonian Institution, where more than 200 Iraqi heritage professionals have been trained in basic preservation techniques. She has worked with APOYOnline to develop workshops in Colombia, Cuba, and Brazil for participants across Latin America. Norris is grateful for her board service, including the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance, Alliance for HBCU Museums and Galleries, Foundation for the Advancement in Conservation, CCAHA, American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark, and the University of Delaware, as well as many advisory councils, including Our World Heritage.

In 2002, Norris was inducted into the University of Delaware's Alumni Wall of Fame. She has received the AIC Rutherford John Gettens Merit Award for outstanding service (1998), the Sheldon and Caroline Keck Award for excellence in the education of conservation professionals (2004), the AIC University Products Award for distinguished achievement in the conservation of cultural property (2008), and the College Art Association/ AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation (2016). In May 2018, Norris was named a Francis Alison Scholar, UD’s top faculty honor.

Outside of conservation, Norris has served UD as an interim associate dean for the arts, the humanities, social sciences, and graduate education and as vice provost for graduate and professional education (2008-10).

Dr. Michelle Ramos applies critical race theory and lived experiences to disrupt long standing white supremacist structures and systems. Her work focuses on shifting power to black, brown people through pushing boundaries, challenging the status quo and reflecting values of equity and justice in her day to day practice. Before leading Alternate ROOTS, she worked as Managing Director for the Vera Institute of Justice New Orleans and Program Officer for the Women’s Foundation of California. She serves on the boards of Dance/USA and Performing Arts Alliance.

A licensed attorney with a PhD in Cultural Psychology, she has significant organizing experience and has committed her career to serving communities and individuals adversely impacted by issues of race, gender, disability, class, socioeconomics, inequitable laws and systemic oppression. She has consulted for over 20 years nationally and internationally. She is the proud mother of Broadway choreographer, Ellenore Scott, and since retiring from her own dance career, Ramos has continued to teach dance, has competed as an Ironman triathlete and now enjoys her southern New Orleans lifestyle.

Sarah Scaturro was recently appointed the Eric and Jane Nord Chief Conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she is in charge of conservation and analytical laboratories in addition to integral preparatory, framing, and conservation imaging activities. She mentors preprogram and emerging conservation professionals, and with the support of the museum’s educators and conservators, she recently developed a paid micro-internship model that exposes local public high school and undergraduate students to the conservation profession and museum work in general. From 2012 to 2020 she was the Head Conservator of The Costume Institute in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, managing the preservation of the fashion collection, the safe display and storage of fashion, and the development of the conservation research program. In that role she helped create the Museum’s most visited exhibitions including Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (over 1.7 million visitors); grew the conservation department from one permanent, full-time conservator to five, with an additional endowed Fellowship position; raised the department’s profile in media outlets such as Vogue, New York Times, The Art Newspaper, The New Yorker, among many others; and created the now popular hashtag #fashionconservation. Previously, she was the Assistant Fashion Curator and Textile Conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She is a Doctoral Candidate at Bard Graduate Center, writing her dissertation (funded in part by the Center for Craft) on the development of textile conservation and dress history in North America and the UK during the 20th century, using oral histories as a primary methodology. She has curated six exhibitions, including The Secret Life of Textiles: Synthetic Materials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has a forthcoming exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art on the role of conservation in the life of textiles, specifically the museum’s Four Seasons tapestry suite. She studies conservation theory and history, fashion and textile theory, the role of the museum in the creation of knowledge, and the politics of cultural heritage. Her research interests also include the materiality and rematerializing of fashion and the preservation of synthetic materials found in 20th and 21st century objects. She earned a BA, summa cum laude, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MA at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Academic Excellence. You can follow the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Conservation Department on social media using #cmaconservation.

Laura Hortz Stanton is Executive Director of CCAHA. She is responsible for executing CCAHA’s strategic goals, managing large scale conservation and preservation projects with partner organizations, and leading internal and external teams. She also oversees CCAHA’s budget and works with the Board of Directors.

Laura is a member of the National Heritage Responders of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (FAIC). She also serves as member of the AIC Member Designation Working Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and is a member of the Performing Arts Readiness Sustainability Subcommittee.

Laura first joined the staff of CCAHA in 2005 as the Preservation Specialist, after which she served as Director of Preservation Services. She previously served as the Curator of Collections at the Siouxland Heritage Museums in Sioux Falls, SD. She received her MA from the Museum Studies Program at the Cooperstown Graduate Program and her BA in Anthropology and Archaeology from Temple University.

Sarah Sutton is Principal of Sustainable Museums, a consultancy for cultural organizations pursuing climate action, and is the Cultural Sector Lead for America is All In, the largest coalition of supporters of the Paris Agreement anywhere in the World. She is the grants manager for the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, a new granting program supporting energy efficiency and clean energy projects at visual arts institutions. She teaches in the Harvard University Extension School Museum Studies program and serves on the Climate Task Force for the American Psychological Association. Sarah is a co-author of two editions of The Green Museum (as Sarah Brophy) and author of Environmental Sustainability at Historic Sites & Museums.

Glenn Wharton is a Professor of Art History at UCLA and Chair of the UCLA/Getty Conservation of Cultural Heritage Program. Prior to this appointment, he was on faculty of Museum Studies at New York University. He initiated and managed MoMA’s time-based media conservation program during its early years, and he currently co-directs the NYU-based Artist Archives Initiative that develops digital information systems for the display and conservation of contemporary art. He received his Ph.D. in Conservation from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and his M.A. in Conservation from the Cooperstown Graduate Program in New York.