Dana Hemmenway
Dana C. Hemmenway is a senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress. Her duties include serving as a conservation division liaison to several custodial divisions coordinating the conservation and preservation needs for their photographic collections. Dana also works closely with the Interpretative Programs Office coordinating, reviewing, and preparing collection material for exhibition. Dana served as preservation co-team leader for a three-year effort to prepare Library collections to move to an offsite storage facility in Culpeper, Virginia.For the past year and half Dana works one day per month, at The Phillips Collection as their conservator of photographs surveying and treating the collection, as well as, reviewing items for loan. She has treated photographs for the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the Brett Weston Archives.
Dana received a Master of Science degree from the University of Delaware/Winterthur Program in Art Conservation where she specialized in photographic materials and minored in paper conservation. She completed an internship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and upon graduation Dana served as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received further training as one of the first group of conservators to participate in the Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation sponsored by George Eastman House and the Image Permanence Institute (IPI). In the following two years Dana stayed on to work for the Program developing a conservation library and performing duties as Program faculty such as advising and mentoring fellows with conservation research, and lecturing on selected conservation and preservation topics.
Dana has taught and lectured on various aspects of photograph conservation/preservation on the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels, most recently for School of Library and Information Science students at Catholic University. She was invited to speak at Preserving Photographs in a Digital World, an annual seminar sponsored by IPI in 2001 and 2003, and Identification and Care of Photographic Collections delivered at the Texas Association of Museums Annual Meeting in 1999. Her professional presentations include: preparing collections for moving to offsite storage facilities, cleaning of daguerreotypes, and identification of diazotypes.
Dana is a professional associate of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and served as Secretary/Treasurer for AIC’s Photographic Materials Group of for two consecutive terms, 2003-2007.
