Practice

I have spent fifteen years organizing the visual and material record of other people's lives.

My training is in art history and library science, with a graduate concentration in visual archives at the University of Minnesota. My first professional years were inside an institution, processing photographic collections and learning the disciplines that institutional archiving teaches. I left for private practice in 2014 and have not returned.

The work that arrived once I went private was wider than I expected. Families called about photographs and brought me letters, journals, professional papers, recordings, and objects whose meaning was held only in the family's memory. The practice expanded because the material did. I earned my credential with The Photo Managers and added the working knowledge of digital asset management the families were asking for. I now work with one family at a time on collections that do not have a single trade name.

I came to Sondage because the work I had been doing for years had no published outcome standard to point to. The collections I assembled were trusted because I was trusted. When I was no longer in the room, the trust had no anchor. The LCC credential changes that.

What an engagement looks like

A Heritage Curation engagement begins with a four-week Seminar on the Trove and continues, on commissioning, into a full six-month Chapter of accession.

The first weeks are spent looking together. The Senior Fellow brings me what she has and I help her understand what it is. The Significance Determination, in the second and third weeks, is where the work earns its name. The two of us, in disciplined conversation, decide what is worthy of preservation, what is worthy of description, and what may be released without loss. The Chapter that follows is the slow work of accession, organization, and the documentation that allows the collection to be read by a descendant fifty years from now.

The materials remain in the Senior Fellow's keeping at every stage. The architecture of the eventual archive is supplied by Sondage. The judgment is hers and mine.

Curatorial Statement

A family's collection is not a problem to be solved. It is a body of material that carries the shape of a life, and it asks to be read with the discipline any primary source asks for. My work is to bring the methodological frame to the conversation. The judgment, where it concerns what a particular photograph or letter or object means, belongs to the person who lived it. What I sign at the close of an engagement is the record of how the two of us read it together.

Worked Significance Determination

A redacted sample of a complete Significance Determination from a recent engagement is available to Senior Fellows actively considering commissioning a Season.

How I work

[Unlisted video. 4 minutes 12 seconds.]

A look at the room where I receive materials and the kind of attention the work asks for.

Credentials

Legacy Collection Curator, Sondage. Certified 2026.

Certified Photo Manager, The Photo Managers.

Member, Society of American Archivists.

B.A. History (Art History minor), St. Olaf College
M.A., Library Science, University of Minnesota.

To inquire

A short message is enough. What you have, and what you are thinking about doing with it. The first conversation will be unhurried.

[Contact form]