National Convening Speaker Biographies

Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress on September 14, 2016. Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead the national library, was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama on February 24, 2016, and her nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 13.

Prior to her latest post she served, since 1993, as CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland. Hayden was nominated by President Obama to be a member of the National Museum and Library Services Board in January 2010 and was confirmed to that post by the Senate in June 2010. Prior to joining the Pratt Library, Hayden was deputy commissioner and chief librarian of the Chicago Public Library from 1991 to 1993. She was an assistant professor for Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh from 1987 to 1991. Hayden was library services coordinator for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago from 1982 to 1987. She began her career with the Chicago Public Library as the young adult services coordinator from 1979 to 1982 and as a library associate and children’s librarian from 1973 to 1979.

Hayden was president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In 1995, she was the first African American to receive Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year Award in recognition of her outreach services at the Pratt Library, which included an after-school center for Baltimore teens offering homework assistance and college and career counseling. Hayden received a B.A. from Roosevelt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago.

Shelly C. Lowe is Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lowe is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Arizona. From 2015 to 2021 she served as a member of the National Council on the Humanities, the 26-member advisory body to NEH, an appointment she received from President Obama. Lowe’s career in higher education has included roles as Executive Director of the Harvard University Native American Program, Assistant Dean in the Yale College Dean’s Office, and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University. Prior to these positions, she spent six years as the Graduate Education Program Facilitator for the American Indian Studies Programs at the University of Arizona.

Lowe has served in a variety of leadership roles nationally, most recently as a member of the University of Arizona Alumni Association Governing Board and of the Challenge Leadership Group for the MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship. She has served on the board of the National Indian Education Association and as a trustee on the board for the National Museum of the American Indian.

Lowe holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, a Master of Arts in American Indian Studies, and has completed doctoral coursework in Higher Education from the University of Arizona.

Héctor J. Berdecía-Hernández is the founding Director-General of the Centro de Conservación y Restauración de Puerto Rico (CENCOR), a non-profit Conservation center serving Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region. At CENCOR, he is responsible for the institutional development of the Center, strategic planning, and supervision of operations, as well as the execution of special preservation and conservation projects, services, research, and initiatives. Héctor also serves as an advisor to cultural institutions on technical matters related to preserving cultural heritage. He is an Adjunct Professor in preservation technology and materials conservation at the Graduate Program in Architectural Conservation and Rehabilitation at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. 

As a conservator and educator, teaching and research focus on the conservation of historic buildings and sites, the history of traditional building technology, and the conservation of historic building materials, particularly masonry mortars, concrete, and cementitious materials, as well as issues related to public policy in heritage preservation and sustainable development.

Héctor holds an M.S. in Historic Preservation with a concentration in Architectural Materials Conservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a 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 de Firenze.

Moriah Ulinskas (she/her) is an audiovisual archivist and PhD candidate in Public History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the impact of post-war redevelopment programs on communities of color, with a focus on audiovisual archives. She is a founding member of the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) - a collective of film and video archivists who work to help communities maintain intellectual control over their legacy recordings. Moriah managed CAW's IMLS funded "Training of Trainers" project and currently oversees the group’s NEH funded "Audiovisual Collections Care in Tribal Archives" project.

Moriah has worked as a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, SFMOMA, San Francisco Arts Commission, and was the manager of the Diversity & Inclusion Fellowship Pilot Program for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She served as the Assistant Reviews Editor for The Public Historian, the journal of the National Council on Public History, from 2020 to 2022 and has published articles in KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, Places Journal, and the Journal of Archival Organization. She was a contributor to Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps.

Briann Greenfield is Director of the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Previously, she was executive director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, an innovative historic house museum. From 2014 to 2018, she served as executive director of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Greenfield is also a former professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, where she administered the public history program and taught broadly across the curriculum.

Greenfield received her bachelor’s degree from the University of New Hampshire and earned an MA in Museum Studies and a PhD in American Studies from Brown University. She has held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, NEH, and Winterthur Museum. In 2010, she received Central Connecticut State University’s prestigious Board of Trustees Research Award. Her areas of research include public memory, material culture, and public history. She is the author of Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).

Suzanne Davis is associate curator for conservation and head of the Conservation Department at the Kelsey Museum, where she oversees the preservation of the museum’s 100,000+ artifacts and historic building. She currently directs conservation programs for the Kelsey’s Abydos Middle Cemetery project in Egypt, the El-Kurru and Jebel Barkal projects in Sudan, and the Notion Archaeological Project in Turkey. She also serves as affiliated faculty for the University's Museum Studies Program.

She received graduate degrees in art history and conservation from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC). Prior to joining the Kelsey in 2001, she was a conservator for the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, DC. Suzanne is currently the president of the AIC and serves on the board of its philanthropic affiliate, the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation.

Her research is centered in three areas: 1) investigating problems and improving preservation outcomes for archaeological sites and collections, 2) community-engaged, collaborative practice in archaeology and conservation, and 3) ancient materials and technology. She has also studied and written about ancient graffiti, visitor experience at museums and archaeological sites, and gender equity in conservation and museums.  

In addition to her conservation work for the Kelsey, she has co-curated two exhibitions at the museum, Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile (2019–2020, with Geoff Emberling), and Conserving Antiquity, (2012–2013, with Claudia Chemello).

Brian Vallo is a member of the Pueblo of Acoma tribe in New Mexico, one of the oldest, continuously inhabited settlements in North America.  Brian is a cultural leader, former Governor, and an artist.  With over 30 years of experience working in the areas of cultural resources management, repatriation of ancestors and their associate funerary objects and objects of cultural patrimony, museum development, public policy, tourism, and the arts, Brian has dedicated much of his professional career towards collaborative approaches to addressing issues affecting Native American people.  In addition to serving three consecutive terms as Governor of his Pueblo, he was also appointed to serve three terms as Lt. Governor. Prior to becoming Governor in 2019, Brian was the Director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM where he was instrumental in the development and publication of the Guidelines for Collaboration, a now valuable resource for both tribes and museums.  Currently, Brian is an independent consultant providing professional services to museums, universities, federal and state agencies, and private collectors on a number of issues including repatriation, exhibit development, collections stewardship, policy assessment and development, and education.  Brian serves on a number of national boards including the National Museum of the Nation Museum, Conservation Lands Foundation, and the Native Lands Institute, to name a few. A self-taught artist, Brian is inspired by historic Pueblo pottery and the natural and cultural landscape of Acoma Pueblo to which he remains connected.