What do you do here at the Academy?
As a senior exhibit content developer, I help bring the research and work being driven by the Academy to life through our exhibitions. I’m a storyteller, and that shows up in all of my work, from developing ideas for exhibitions to fleshing out themes and content with expert advisors.
For example, the labels you’ll see on the public floor are written by us content developers. But that’s just one aspect of our job bringing stories into physical form in our exhibits.The content team is responsible for selecting the objects and specimens that go on display. This involves working in tandem with our collections managers, designers, and registrars, and thinking about not only what can safely be displayed on the public floor, but also identifying compelling entry points for our visitors—something they can connect with.
I also work with a lot of different teams to develop more experiential elements of our exhibits like videos, interactive experiences, other media, and more. It’s a very collaborative team.
How did you get interested in working in museums?
I didn't always know I wanted to work in museums. My senior year at UC Berkeley I applied for the undergraduate research apprenticeship program and was placed at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. I've always been an avid fan of museums and a lover of all things natural history and wildlife, but actually being in the museum, getting to go through the archives and being surrounded by the collections kind of opened my eyes to the idea of museums as a place to have a career.
Then I got a job in Los Angeles, where I'm from originally, as an educator for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It was during that role that I realized I wanted to do more with the exhibits side of museums, so I applied to grad school in museum studies and focused on curatorship and exhibition development. I’ve taken my 15 plus years in museums from there.
And the Academy also had a role in your early career development, right?
Yeah! When I was a grad student in 2010 I was the collections assistant for the Naturalist Center. It was the perfect role to have in grad school. So when the opportunity arose to join the exhibits team twelve years later, it felt like coming home to the Academy for me. Plus it was super-helpful to have some familiarity with the Academy since I joined staff during the pandemic.
With a collection of 46 million specimens to pick from, how do you narrow it down and select what’s going to be in an exhibit?
It depends on the space that we're working in. For something like the West Hall, which will house our new California: State of Nature exhibit, our incredibly beautiful building poses some light, temperature, and humidity limitations that inform how things show up in the exhibit. For example, Chrissy Piotrowski, our senior collections manager for invertebrate zoology, told the team about these incredible new-to-science glass sponges found off the shipwrecked USS Independence near Monterey Bay described by curator Gary Williams. We would have loved to display these sponges, but they are so delicate that it’s tough to do so safely in this space. So we ended up creating a video about that story instead.
But in terms of thinking about what specimens and research stories we want to highlight, I think it takes a lot of bigger blue sky brainstorming to narrow down what will help tell the story of an exhibit. There are different ways that we can tell these stories, too; they don't always have to be represented as specimens on display. Something could be shown in a photo, video, or as a model or hands-on interactive. We have fun things we do like capacitive touch, where you touch a bronze cast of a bird, for example, and then the visitor will hear that bird call as the audio is activated.
At the beginning of a project we often have a lot more ideas than eventually make it into the final narrative. But we save those ideas and content nuggets for future exhibits or things that could be expressed in a program.
What is your favorite piece or element of the new California: State of Nature exhibit?
It's really hard to pick just one, so I’ll spotlight a few. I love the urban ecology content and that we’ll be able to connect visitors with species that live right here, in San Francisco, on our streets, in our backyards. Being able to tell the story of how the health of wildlife is very closely entwined with the health of people is, I think, a really important message for our visitors. I’m also grateful we have the opportunity to spotlight the urban ecology research being led by our trustee Dr. Chris Schell. It’s a really great way to get people to connect with local flora and fauna and hopefully foster a little more empathy for certain species, particularly the coyote, for example.
I also think that the fire story in the exhibit is very important. We created a video about how fire promotes healthy ecosystems, including plants that require fire to germinate and fire-adapted species like redwoods. We have incredible footage of a cultural burn, where Native partners speak to the role that Indigenous burning has played for thousands of years in California. It’s also a great opportunity to spotlight how the Academy is involved via the Caples Creek project. It is our hope that the Academy will be a place for visitors to learn about low intensity fires, healthy fire, and how fire can be part of the conversation in the California landscape.
And my last pick is something really fun: an interactive scent station where you can smell different scents from California’s forests. We have some very pleasant scents like conifer and bay laurel, but then we also have the fetid adder’s tongue, which is a very stinky flower that smells like a mixture of rotting meat and body odor. I really enjoyed working with Sarah Jacobs, assistant curator of botany, on selecting the plants and the scents for that.
Can you tell us a little more about the Indigenous elements in California: State of Nature and why this work is important to you?
Working with Native partners is something that's close to my heart, and something that I've been fortunate to be able to do in previous roles before coming to the Academy, including the Autry Museum. Having their voices, insights, and knowledge in our exhibits is invaluable. In California: State of Nature we spotlight the work of tribal partners across the state through photos, video, quotes, and artworks, from condor reintroduction in Yurok territory up north down to the Native American Land Conservancy in the Mojave Desert.
What do you like to do outside of the Academy?
I love getting outdoors! On a typical weekend you’ll find me hiking with my dog Carlsbad on one of the Bay’s many amazing trails. (Fun fact: I rescued him from a shelter in Fresno, and he is named after Carlsbad Caverns, as all the pups in his litter were named after national parks!) I love to travel when I’m able. Eight years ago I spent six months backpacking through Southeast Asia, visiting Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, and Laos. I got to check the island of Komodo off my bucket list, plus saw snow monkeys in hot springs in Nagano, Japan, which felt like a very National Geographic moment.
