Alison Gilchrest

Alison Gilchrest is the Director of The Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH) at Yale University and a strategy leader in systems for capacity and investment in ethical stewardship of global cultural heritage. Her focus at Yale is to advance best practices in conservation, heritage science, technical imaging, cultural heritage AI, and international exchange. Prior to Yale she led the largest US-based grant program focused on sustaining the fields of art history, curatorship, art conservation, and heritage science as a program officer at the Mellon Foundation. Over her career she has led domestic and international programs to resource new subfields of expertise, rapidly diversify pathways into museum and heritage careers, and redress the state of provenance, display, and preservation of Native American, Indigenous, and African cultural heritage in the US. She holds a BA in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and an MSIS in Museum Information Systems from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science. She received the 2022 Forbes Medal from the American Institute for Conservation for distinguished contributions to the field, and is an elected fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC).