President

F. Carey Howlett is a conservator with more than 45 years of experience in the conservation of historic furniture and architectural interiors. He is president and chief conservator of F. Carey Howlett & Associates, a firm providing services to museums, historic sites and private clients. He is a graduate of the Smithsonian Program in Furniture Conservation and served in the conservation department at Colonial Williamsburg for fourteen years, where he was director of conservation from 1998-2001.

Secretary

Jane Hohensee, the Senior Registrar at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, is responsible for documenting and managing their artifact collection and inward loans exhibited at the Foundation’s museums.  Prior to that, Jane worked at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for eight years as the assistant and then associate registrar in the department of collections. In her nearly thirty-year museum career, Jane has had the opportunity to coordinate many conservation projects with specialist conservators. Jane is dedicated to artifact preservation and looks forward to working on the VCA Board in the position of Secretary.  She lives in Williamsburg with her husband and their rescued beagle. In her spare time, she likes spending time outdoors and reading.

Treasurer

Susan Adler graduated from the Winterthur Conservation program in 1996 with a specialty in Textile Conservation.  She then spent four years at Colonial Williamsburg under the guidance of Leroy Graves in the Upholstery Conservation Lab. She went into private practice, working for such diverse collections as the VMFA, Agecroft Hall, The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, the Maine State Museum, and the Rangeley Historical Society, Rangeley Maine. She has been retired since 2020. Susan has been a member of VCA for 30 years and has served on the board in several different capacities.  She is looking forward with great pleasure to working again with the vibrant, creative group of people that is the VCA.

Membership

Nora Bloch is the Collections Care Librarian & Conservator for Virginia Commonwealth  University Libraries. She specializes in books and paper and especially enjoys teaching book repair to the incredibly talented Collections Care Technicians who are VCU student workers. She holds her B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz, her M.L.I.S. from the University of California Los Angeles, and her M.A. in Conservation Studies, specializing in books and paper, from West Dean College of Arts, Design, Craft and Conservation in England.

Programs

Jenni is a recent graduate of the SUNY Buffalo State University Art Conservation program where she specialized in works on paper. She spent the past year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as their third-year Graduate Intern and will be continuing on as the Assistant Conservator of Works on Paper, NEH Fellow beginning this September. She holds a B.A. in Art History with minors in Studio Art and Chemistry from the University of South Alabama in her hometown of Mobile, AL. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked as a book designer for a small independent publisher and as an outreach coordinator at the Mobile Botanical Gardens. Previous conservation experience includes hurricane recovery work at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, wall painting conservation at a medieval church in Wiltshire, England, book and paper conservation at the Georgia Archives, a summer at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and most recently the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. She and her well-traveled cat, Lucy, have been enjoying being back in the South and in her free time she likes to bake treats for her coworkers and make the occasional craft. 

Publications

Jackie Peterson-Grace is the Associate Textile Conservator at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. She completed a Master of Science from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation in 2018 with concentrations in textile and preventive conservation and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Conservation Studies from Marist College. As a graduate student, she completed internships in the textile conservation labs at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Peebles Island Resource Center. She worked closely with collections care staff at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia from 2018 to 2020 to address textile preservation needs.