Barbara Henry, as Principal of Barbara Henry & Associates, is devoted to transforming museums into thriving cultural places embraced by their communities. Her work focuses on achieving an organization’s desired public goals within an environment of increasing change, complexity, and ambiguity. A museum practitioner with more than 25 years of experience, her expertise spans various community engagement strategies, including long-term advisory councils; visitor-centered experiences engaging diverse audiences; experimental public programs and education initiatives; and related strategies for institutional change and sustainability. She is a visiting faculty member for Fundación TyPA’s TyPA Lab on Museum Management. She is currently President of The Museum Group, a US collective of museum consultants. Barbara held executive positions as Lab Center Director and Chief Curator of Education at the Oakland Museum of California. She directed major projects that led to transforming the museum. Barbara co-edited the book How We/Visitors Changed Our Museum: Transforming the Gallery of California Art at the Oakland Museum of California. She has been a panel reviewer for the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Barbara earned her MAT in Museum Education from The George Washington University and her BA in Art History from U.C. Berkeley.

Kathleen McLean directs Independent Exhibitions, a museum consulting firm specializing in exhibition development, design, programming, and planning. Since 1974, McLean has created a wide range of exhibitions in history, art, and science museums, and interdisciplinary and children’s museums, many of which focus on social issues and public participation.

In 2018, McLean received the American Alliance of Museums’ Distinguished Service to Museums Award. In 2006, she was selected for AAM’s Centennial Honor Roll, as one of 100 museum professionals who made a significant contribution to American museums over the last 100 years.

From January 1994 to September 2004 McLean was Director of the Center for Public Exhibition and Public Programs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California. From 1986 to 1990, she established the first exhibitions department at Brooklyn Children’s Museum in New York. 

McLean is co-author of The Convivial Museum; co-editor of How We Visitors Changed Our Museum, Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, Are We There Yet? Conversations about Best Practices in Science Exhibition Development; and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions. For 10 years she was exhibition editor of Curator: The Museum Journal, and has published and spoken on museum design, informal learning, and exhibitions.

Sarah Zenaida Gould is the Director of Museo del Westside, an emerging community museum project of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. A longtime museum worker, she has curated over a dozen exhibits on history, art and culture. Gould is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, a national organization that promotes historic preservation within American Latino communities and advocates for the protection of American Latino (in)tangible heritage. Additionally, she serves on the board of El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association and is an active member of the Westside Preservation Alliance, a coalition dedicated to promoting and preserving the working-class architecture of San Antonio’s historic Westside. She received a BA in American Studies from Smith College and an MA and PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She is a former fellow at the National Museum of American History, the Winterthur Museum, and the American Antiquarian Society, and is an alumna of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute.

Suzanne (Suzy) Seriff is an independent museum curator, academic, and public folklorist who combines experience-based teaching with museum curation and consultation, nationwide, at the intersection of traditional arts, community engagement and social justice. Seriff received her PhD from the Department of Folklore and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she currently teaches and serves as Director of a social justice internship program in Jewish Studies and a study abroad program on immigration through the arts in Oaxaca, Mexico.

She is the 2018 recipient (along with Dr. Marsha Bol) of the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovation in Museums from the American Council for Museum Anthropology, which honors her work, from 2010-2017, as Founding Director of the Gallery of Conscience, an experimental exhibition lab at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that draws on the power of traditional arts to catalyze dialogue, engagement and action around social justice and human rights issues. Deemed a “model of museum practice for the 21st century”, the Gallery of Conscience has tackled such timely global topics as HIV/AIDS, women’s empowerment, natural disasters, immigration, and the ethics of the global folk art marketplace.

Seriff has curated several award-winning traveling exhibitions including Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Arts from the Global Scrap Heap, Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island and Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives that Transform Communities. 

She is a native Texan, married to her childhood sweetheart, with two grown children, both chefs, and a deep love for dark chocolate.

Brandie Macdonald is the Director of Decolonizing Initiatives at San Diego Museum of Man. Her work aligns with her passion of developing pathways for museums to apply decolonial methodology, which focuses on dismantling colonial legacy, structural racism, and inequitable practices. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, with ancestral ties to the Choctaw Nation. Her non-profit career is based around capacity building through transformative education, which is rooted in open-ended and experiential pedagogies. Prior to her work at the Museum of Man, Brandie led the First Peoples Fund’s arts and economic capacity building initiatives on Indigenous reservations nationally. She managed their professional development trainings for Native artists and other organization programs. Additionally, she was the founder of their Indigenous Youth Leadership Initiative, called Dances with Words – a spoken word program on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation which focuses on Indigenous inter-generational healing through oral tradition. Brandie is an Education Studies doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego, where her research focuses on the praxis of decolonization within informal learning spaces, specifically museums. She was a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, a Diversity Fellow for the American Alliance of Museums and a Smithsonian Affiliate Fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Elaine Heumann Gurian has long taken the position that museums give off signals of uninterrogated exclusion in areas other than content and that a kind of smug lack of self-reflection mitigate against real welcome. Now she is focused on the importance of national healing by looking at museum habits that seek to simplify, flatten and exclude not only the interests of marginalized cultural peoples but also those who were formerly felt central to the American dialogue. The polarization of our nation requires that we reinstate the value of messy political centrality, the overarching humanity of us all, and methodology that privileges ambiguity, lack of resolution and the embrace of nuance.

Anna Woten is the Assistant Collections Manager for the Atlanta History Center, where she helps to manage the institution’s 57,000 objects spread across its campuses, manages incoming loans for exhibition purposes, and works with exhibition teams to develop exhibit content. Anna also works both nationally and internationally towards LGBTQIA+ inclusion in museums, including her role as Chairperson of the American Alliance of Museums’ LGBTQ Alliance Professional Network. She also served as Co-chair and Project Manager for the Task Force for Transgender Inclusion’s Gender Transition and Transgender Inclusion in the Museum Workplace: A Toolkit for Trans Individuals, Institutions, and Coworkers, which was released to international acclaim in March, 2019. She is currently working towards strengthening trans voices within the museum field, diversifying the LGBTQ Alliance’s membership, and developing partnerships with other Professional Networks and outside organizations.

Christy Coleman grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia and earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Hampton University. She currently serves as CEO of the American Civil War Museum, located in Richmond and Appomattox, Virginia. In her role as CEO, she has been instrumental in furthering discussion around the Civil War, its legacies, and its relevance to our lives today not only in the Richmond region but around the nation and leading the museum to national prominence.

She began her career at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF). During her time with CWF she had increasing levels of responsibility, finally serving as Director of Historic Programs, responsible for all programming and tours in the Historic Area. In 1999 she left to become President and CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, MI. In 2008, Ms. Coleman was named President and CEO of the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar (ACWC). 

In 2013 she helped orchestrate the merger of ACWC with the Museum of the Confederacy to create the American Civil War Museum (ACWM). In addition to her work at ACWM, Christy has served on a number of local commissions and national boards. She strives to make museum experiences meaningful to diverse communities. A tireless advocate for the power of museums, narrative disruption and inclusivity, she has been an innovator and leader in the history museum field. She’s written numerous articles, is an accomplished and award-winning screenwriter, public speaker and has appeared on several national news programs and documentaries.

Laura L. Lott is President and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, representing the entire scope of the museum community. After being named the first woman to lead the organization in 2015, Laura led the development and launch of AAM’s strategic plan which includes strategic focus on diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion; financial sustainability; and museums’ role in P-12 education. Laura raised the Alliance’s first seven-figure gift and is spearheading an unprecedented initiative aimed at increasing the diversity of nonprofit boards.

Prior to being CEO, as AAM’s Chief Operating Officer, Laura led the 2012 re-launch of the Alliance, including rebranding the organization and redesigning its membership and excellence programs to be more inclusive, leading to 70 percent membership growth. A passionate advocate for strong and engaged boards, Laura frequently speaks about nonprofit governance, organizational leadership, and strategy.

After graduating from American University in Washington, D.C., Laura worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers with a focus on nonprofit clients. Laura is a Virginia-licensed CPA, a private pilot, and a proud mom.

Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist whose work investigates museological, cultural, and historical issues, which are largely overlooked or neglected by museums and cultural institutions. Since his groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, Wilson has been the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions around the globe, including the retrospective Objects and Installations 1979-2000, which was organized by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. His work has been exhibited extensively in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Institute of Jamaica, W.I., the Museum of World Cultures, Sweden, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the British Museum, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 

His work can be found in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Long Museum, Shanghai, the Tate Modern in London and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Most recently he presented his new exhibition Afro Kismet at the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, which traveled to New York, Los Angeles and in 2020 to the Gibbes Museum in South Carolina. Since 2008 Wilson has been a member of the Board of Trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He represented the U.S. at the Cairo Biennale (1992) and the Venice Biennale (2003). His many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Grant (1999), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2006), the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change fellowship (2018) and Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award (2019). 

^{photograph: Pace Gallery}