Speaker Bios

Tahmida Afroze is currently a Graduate Intern at the Getty Conservation Institute. She has worked as an advisor in collection management for the art collection of Bengal Foundation, the leading cultural foundation in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is enrolled in a joint master course in "Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management" organized by University of Applied Arts Vienna and Silpakorn University International College, Bangkok., Thailand. Having an academic and work background in architecture and Museum Studies, Tahmida is ardent about building a career in the heritage sector, specifically gaining more practical knowledge in the field of preventive conservation. 

Carolina Benitez is a first-generation, pre-program emerging conservation professional with a background in working in museums. She graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a B.A. in Art History in 2021. Before discovering the world of art conservation, she previously held various museum roles in education, visitor services, curatorial, registration, and collections. She learned about art conservation through the UCLA/Getty Opportunity for Diversity in Conservation summer workshop in 2021, and has an interest in working in a variety of specialties. She has since held conservation positions at the Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Research Institute, Getty Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Autry Museum of the American West, and is currently interning at the Margaret Herrick Library.

Pilar Brooks has a BA in art history with a minor in studio art from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and is applying for graduate school to study objects conservation. She is currently a Collections Specialist at the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Margaret Herrick Library rehousing of the Richard Balzer Pre-Cinema Collection. She relocated to Los Angeles to be part of the Getty Post-Baccalaureate Conservation program’s 2022-2023 cohort, where she interned with the Getty Research Institute, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and the Margaret Herrick Library. Her other pre-program experiences include conservation internships with the University of Washington Libraries, the Minnesota History Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.While at the MFA Boston, Pilar researched the conservation and history of contested monuments and presented her findings with her colleague at the 2022 AIC Annual Meeting. She was also a Semifinalist and Nominee for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program for an independent research grant proposal to study with the Ethnographic Museum of Rwanda. Pilar also served as the first Orlando Liaison of the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network from 2021-2022. 

Cheyenne Caraway is a Getty Graduate Fellow in the UCLA/Getty M.A. Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Before her graduate program, Cheyenne was a museum contractor in the Four Corners region (2016-2018), the Collections Manager at the Southern Ute Museum (2018-2019), and the Conservation Assistant at the American Museum of Natural History (2022-2023). She has held conservation internships at the National Museum of the American Indian, the American Museum of Natural History, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, and Fine Arts Conservation LLC. Throughout her career, Cheyenne hopes to continue taking holistic approaches to projects while prioritizing a Native perspective and cultivating community relationships.

Adam Chin Blahnik is a current Getty Post-Baccalaureate Conservation Intern. He spent the first six months of the internship period at the Getty Research Institute focusing on paper conservation and is currently interning at the Fowler Museum at UCLA focusing on objects conservation, with a particular emphasis in textiles. He received his B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Art History from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He has previous experience in registration and collections management from the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida.

Maile Chung (she/they) grew up in San Jose, California on the traditional homelands of the Ohlone peoples. They received their MLIS on Duwamish land at the University of Washington focusing on community archival studies and Indigenous Systems of Knowledge and completed her capstone titled, "The Application of Indigenous Knowledge to Decolonize a Non-Native Cultural Museum Collections.” Currently, she is in a temporary post-graduate position at the UCLA Library in the Preservation & Conservation Department working with digitizing and preserving audiovisual materials and technology. Answering research requests, she has worked with a variety of collections and AV formats from home movies to oral histories and from lacquer discs to super 8mm film. Through this position, she hopes to gain knowledge in the audiovisual conservation field and bring these new skills to her tribe’s archives and other BIPOC community organizations. With a background in community museums and archives, they hope to continue their career working in these spaces with community materials focusing on preservation and open access utilizing traditional methods by the community for the community. 

Jules Eckelkamp (she/her) hails from Southern Louisiana and is a fashion historian and textile conservator. She previously worked in the theatre and performance industry in costume design and construction and has recently completed her Master’s in Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her main areas of research are western wear and southern culture, gender and fashion, and fashion in film. Her most recent publication focused on the foundation of the country and blues music genres and the creation and solidification of the artists’ respective styles of dress. She is the current Samuel H. Kress conservation fellow at the Autry Museum, where she has continued her western wear research while simultaneously performing mounting and conservation treatments on a variety of native objects for upcoming exhibitions at the Autry Museum. 

Abigail Lenhard (she/her) is a pre-program conservator interested in dyes, pigments, and material analysis. Her previous experiences include the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and she is currently working at LACMA in Scientific Research. She hopes to pursue conservation at the graduate level following her custom BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study which focused on “Faktura and Forgery.”

Caroline Longo (she/her) is the current Graduate Intern for the Modern and Contemporary Art Research Initiative at the Getty Conservation Institute. Prior to joining the Getty, Caroline completed her Master of Art Conservation with a specialization in objects conservation at Queen’s University in 2023, and her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2021. While at Queen’s, Caroline completed graduate conservation internships at the Denver Art Museum, Glenstone, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Caroline’s research interests focus on the development of sustainable conservation treatments and documentation frameworks for modern and contemporary materials, including plastics, modern metal alloys, and mixed-media installations. 

Alexa Machnik (she/her) is a graduate student at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is in her final year of the MS/MA conservation program, and the Mellon Fellow in Paper Conservation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before coming to NYU, she received a BA in Art History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As part of this degree, she studied Japanese and spent a year abroad in Kyoto. 

Moupi Mukhopadhyay (she/her) is a fifth year PhD student in the Conservation of Material Culture program at UCLA. With an engineering background complemented with Buddhist studies, Moupi is aiming for a professional career as a conservation scientist. Her research interests include non-invasive analytical techniques for material characterization, conservation of active sites or artifacts subjected to frequent communal interaction, and social sustainability. Moupi also holds special interest towards pigments and dyes and hopes to encounter more questions around their photophysical properties in future projects. One of her main goals is to produce accessible publications about conservation for general audiences of a large age range to increase awareness and appreciation towards the field. 

Jenna Rheinhardt (she/her) recently graduated from UCLA’s Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics undergraduate program and a minor in Art History as of June 2023. She has worked with LA Art Labs LLC under Kamila Korbela since July of 2022 as a conservation technician. Jenna has presented virus research focusing on Characterization of Subcluster A15 Shows Genomic Distinction from the Largest Known Cluster of Actinobacteriophages at the MIMG Winter 2022 Undergraduate Research Symposium.  

Margalit Schindler (they/them) is Principal Conservator at Pearl Preservation LLC, a preventive conservation consultation and services firm. Pearl Preservation is guided by material science, sustainable preservation practice, and ethical decision making to support and steward collections of all kinds. Founded on the Jewish value of L’dor va dor, from generation to generation, Pearl Preservation specializes in the support of Judaica and Jewish material culture. Margalit is a formally trained preventive conservator with a decade of experience working in museums and preservation labs. They are a graduate of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and have worked at institutions including The Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA), the Cleveland Museum of Art, and ICA Art Conservation. They are working to combine preventive conservation and social justice, supporting traditionally marginalized collections by sharing information and empowering others. A passion for Jewish culture has led to a focus in studying and impacting the preservation of Judaica in collections around the world.