Alison Gilchrest

Alison Gilchrest is the IPCH Director and served as its inaugural Director of Applied Research and Outreach.  In this role, she facilitated sustained research, training, and professional development partnerships between IPCH and communities of practice, with an emphasis on collaborations outside of North America and Europe.  Prior to arriving at Yale, Alison was Program Officer for Arts and Cultural Heritage at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where she stewarded the largest US-based grant program focused on the art historical, curatorial, scholarly research, art conservation, and the heritage science domains.  For nearly two decades, she has led national and international initiatives to make progress on issues such as diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion across art museums and art conservation, knowledge management, Native and Indigenous cultural heritage, art of Africa and its diasporas, academic museum and library collaboration, scholarship and preservation of time-based media and contemporary art, financial literacy and emergency preparedness for cultural non-profits, and object-based humanities curriculum in higher education.  She also led a pivotal research effort to understand the scope, impact, and financial implications of 50 years of foundation endowment grants across the museum sector. Ms. Gilchrest has previously held research and technical positions in art history and conservation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  She holds an AB in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and an MSIS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science.  She currently serves on the boards of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) in Philadelphia, PA, Voices In Contemporary Art (VoCA.network), and is on the Education Committee of the Guggenheim Museum. She is an elected Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and the recipient of the 2022 American Institute for Conservation’s Forbes Medal for distinguished contributions to the field of conservation.