Gilchrest to direct Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage

03/02/22

Alison Gilchrest has been appointed as the new director of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH). Having joined IPCH in January 2020 as its inaugural director of applied research and outreach, Gilchrest has facilitated research, training, and professional development collaborations between the institute and other cultural heritage institutions, focusing on building Yale’s relationships on the African continent. For over a decade she has led national and international initiatives to promote collaboration in the field of cultural heritage conservation.

At Yale, Gilchrest helped launch the IPCH Directors Forum, a program that provides leaders and entrepreneurs working in Africa’s cultural sector a trusted platform to connect, learn, and collaborate with each other. She has stewarded Yale’s special partnership with the University of Pretoria’s Tangible Heritage Conservation Program, which is dedicated to preserving South Africa’s cultural heritage. She played a pivotal role in organizing and bringing important Yale contributions to the 2020-21 Global Consortium for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (GCPCH), which included commissioning a study on “Reclaiming African Heritage for the Post-Covid Era” by Denise Lim ’20 Ph.D., which chronicled the pandemic’s effect on Africa’s emerging conservation infrastructure.

Gilchrest came to Yale from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she oversaw the largest private grantmaking program for cultural heritage in the United States, and prior to this held positions in conservation and curatorial departments of the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her research and technical studies have been featured in numerous books, catalogues, and journal articles. She holds an MSIS degree with a concentration in museum information systems from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received a bachelor’s degree in the history of art from Bryn Mawr College.

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Read the full article at the Yale News website.