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Speaker Profile: Michelle Finamore
Michelle Tolini Finamore is a Fashion and Design Historian and Curator. Her most recent exhibition Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour opens in September of 2022 at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. As the Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston she curated the groundbreaking 2019 exhibition Gender Bending Fashion in addition to #techstyle, Hollywood Glamour: Fashion and Jewelry from the Silver Screen, Think Pink, and Jewelry by Artists. Books include Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film, Gaetano Savini: The Man Who Was Brioni and Jewelry by Artists: In the Studio, 1940-2000 and articles for European Drama and Performance Studies, Modern Magazine, Fashion Theory, Architecture Boston, and Gastronomica. She has lectured widely and taught courses on fashion/design/film history at Northeastern University, Rhode Island School of Design, Massachusetts College of Art, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Michelle holds a Ph.D. from Bard College and an M.A. from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Speaker Profile: Catherine Allgor
As the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society Catherine Allgor is a noted historian, non-profit leader, and public history innovator. Previously, she had been the Nadine and Robert Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and a former Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside. Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College as a Frances Perkins Scholar and received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Award. She is the author of Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University Press of Virginia, 2000), A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Henry Holt, 2006), Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity (Westview Press) and The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison (University of Virginia Press).
Speaker Profile: Nader Tehrani
For his contributions to architecture as an art, Nader Tehrani is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which he was also elected as a Member in 2021, the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in The United States. Nader Tehrani is Founding Principal of NADAAA and former Dean of The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. His research focuses on the transformation of the building industry, innovative material applications, and the development of new means and methods of construction, especially through digital fabrication. Tehrani’s work has received many prestigious awards, including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and eighteen Progressive Architecture Awards. Prior to becoming Dean at the Cooper Union, he taught at RISD, Harvard GSD, Georgia Institute of Technology, and MIT.
Speaker Profile: Sarah Turner
Sarah Turner is an artist and educator trained in the Northwest, refined in the Midwest and now based in Boston. She is the President of North Bennet Street School. Turner has worked at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, and the State University of New York at New Paltz. She lectures widely, serves regularly as a guest critic, and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands to research Dutch contemporary applied art. She volunteers for a variety of cultural organizations, and currently serves as a Board Member of the Art Jewelry Forum and the Furniture Society. Turner received a BA in Sociology from Smith College and a Certificate in Metalsmithing + Jewelry from the Oregon College of Art & Craft. She earned an MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Allgor, Finamore, Tehrani, and Turner join more than sixty other leading voices in the field, including:
- Dr. Luis Aguirre-Torres, Director of Sustainability, City of Ithaca, NY
- Mary Margaret Earl, Executive Director and Senior Minister of the UU Urban Ministry
- Kathleen Gagne, Executive Director, Mechanics Hall
- Dr. Françoise N. Hamlin, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Brown University
- Kate Lear, Board Chair, Ballet Hispánico
- Leo Lovemore Ph.D., Research Scholar, Recovering New England’s Voices, Historic New England, and Adjunct Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
- Candelaria Silva-Collins, Chair, Designators, George B. Henderson Foundation
- Dr. Carl Skelton, President, Gotham Innovation Greenhouse
- Anne-Marie Soulliere, Retired President, Fidelity Foundations, and Trustee, Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate, Norfolk, CT, home of Yale Chamber Music Festival
