Our Staff
Laura Crow, Museum Director, Costume Curator
LAURA CROW is a Professor of Costume History, Design & Technology at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Dramatic Arts. She has designed Costumes for Broadway, Off-Broadway and Regional Theatres and represented the USA at the Prague Quadrennial five times. Among her awards are the Drama Desk, OBIE, American Theatre Wing, and Villager in New York City, Joseph Jefferson in Chicago, Bay Area Critics, three Drama-Logue awards and the Backstage West Garland Award for designs on the West Coast in LA and San Francisco and four ZONIs from Phoenix. She was included in the recent Lincoln Center Exhibition “Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance,” focusing on 100 women designers from the past 100 years. Professor Crow is Vice Head of the Americas for the Costume Working Group for OISTAT (the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians) and acts as a Liaison for the Costume Commission and the International Commission of USITT (United States Institute of Theatre Technology). Professor Crow is proud to have been a Fulbright Senior Scholar exploring multi-culturalism in festival dress of the Philippines and has spent time researching Carnival costumes in Cuba, Trinidad, New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. She has authored two chapters for Masquerade: A Panorama, published by McFarland Press. As curator for the UCONN Historical Collection of Costumes and Textiles, Professor Crow created the exhibition Women of New England: Dress from the Industrial Age 1850-1900 that was displayed at the Connecticut State House, and subsequently the Benton Museum of Art and the Gallery in the Jorgenson Center for the Performing Arts on the UCONN campus. By the end, over 13,000 people saw the exhibition and learned about the lives of the women through their clothing. The next exhibition planned is Beatrice Fox Auerbach: The Woman, Her World and Her Wardrobe about the first female CEO in Hartford, Connecticut in 1939 when she took over G. Fox & Co, one of the countries largest department stores. In addition she was an important philanthropist, helping the plight of women, children and particularly orphans in Connecticut and in impoverished nations around the world. The exhibit is geared to encourage leadership in women of the next generation.
Dr Andrew DePalma, Technical Advisor
Andrew F. Depalma, PhD, is the Director of Technology at EastCONN. With 19 years of experience in education and information technology (IT) management at UCONN, Depalma is a former Director of IT at UCONN's Center for Continuing Studies. He was a faculty member in UCONN's Neag School of Education for 10 years and has more than 10 years' experience as an administrator and faculty member in information science and knowledge management. Depalma has taught both undergraduate and graduate-level technology and media courses. Depalma holds both an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from UCONN. Depalma will be working on coordinating the effort with the High Schools, working on the museum website and continuing in his interests in K-12 learning.
"Judicious application of technology holds vast promise for improving our ability to make decisions and for creating new opportunities," Andrew Depalma.
Dr Fiona Leek, Textile Curator
Fiona Leek has a Ph.D. & M.S. in Polymer Science from the Institute of Material Science at UCONN, an M.S. in Textile Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, and a B.S. in Museum Science and Archaeology at Wesleyan University. Dr. Leek has been cataloguing the museum’s textile artifacts, advocating and arranging for safe storage. She will continue to explore ways to conserve this valuable collection that has textiles back to Coptic Egypt. She is additionally interested in the longevity and preservation of historical garments.
Dr Christopher Clark, Consultant
Christopher Clark, History Department Chair at the University of Connecticut, grew up in the London area. He studied at the University of Warwick, and obtained his PhD in History at Harvard. He taught at the University of York for eighteen years, and was Professor of North American History at the University of Warwick for another seven years before moving to UConn in 2005. He has held visiting fellowships at Selwyn College, Cambridge; the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; St. Catherine’s College, Oxford; and the UConn Humanities Institute. Clark is a specialist in 18th and 19th century North American and United States social and cultural history; the social history of economic life; the history of American capitalism; rural societies and industrialization; abolitionism and utopian communities; and New England.
Mary Paul, Developer
Mary Paul is a technical director, designer, and developer out of Connecticut. She graduated from Uconn with a BFA in theatre design/production in 2008. She is technical director at Regional Center for the Arts in Trumbull, Connecticut, and has done motion graphics and web development for Rosco Labs and Tim Hunter Designs (NYC). She most recently worked on Lifetime's "Wishin' and Hopin'" with Molly Ringwald, Chevy Chase, and Annabella Sciora and was Art Director on the Chiller Channel's "Five Senses of Fear".
Sulin Park, System Developer
Sulin Park is an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut studying computer science and economics. Her interests in photography and database management brought her into this project. She is also a teacher's assistant for Girls Who Code (girlswhocode.com). Sulin's other interests include, but are not limited to: peach rings, the internet, hand-dripped coffee, 50mm lenses, yoga, attempting to resolve social and spatial disparities through research programming, and almost all dogs.
Timothy Nolan, Content Manager
Tim is an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut majoring in bio-medical engineering who likes to play with photography and automation in his spare time.
Heather Lesieur, Content Manager
Heather is from Texas and has a strong emphasis in costume history and in the construction techniques of period garments. She is in the first year of study in a three-year terminal degree program in the Department of Dramatic Arts, School of Fine Arts.