West Lake Conservators welcomes the newest member of our staff, Luisa Casella.
Luisa specializes in the conservation of photographs, with particular interest in advocacy for photograph preservation and community outreach. She will be offering our clients conservation treatments for photographs of any period, as well as disaster planning and emergency response protocols, environmental preservation monitoring, and collection surveys.
Luisa comes to WLC with a comprehensive and prestigious background in conservation. After training in photograph and paper conservation at the Instituto Politenico de Tomar in Portugal, she worked for eight years in a number of museums, archives, and cultural institutions in Portugal. In 2005, Luisa was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of the Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation at the George Eastman House/Image Permanence Institute in Rochester New York. During this time she designed and implemented an online resource for photograph characterization and conservation, further development of which was awarded a National Leadership Grant for Museums from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In 2007, she achieved a Research Scholarship in Photograph Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Luisa has also worked as Photograph Conservator at Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas at Austin.
We’re very pleased to have her join the West Lake team. Welcome, Luisa!
