Laura Schiavo

Curator

Laura Burd Schiavo has been a curator at the National Building Museum since February 2006, and is currently working on exhibitions in development.

Before joining the Museum, Schiavo worked as the Director of Museum Programs at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington; Exhibitions Curator at the City Museum/Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; and Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. She received her Bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University, and a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University.

Schiavo is interested in cultural history, social history, history of photography, nineteenth-century visual culture, and the history of Washington, D.C. She is a part of the American Association of Museums, Organization of American Historians, American Studies Association, and the American Popular Culture Association.

Selected publications include:

·  "Reading the Image: Visual Culture as Print Culture and the Performance of a Bourgeois Self," Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in the United States before 1900 (Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming)

·  National Building Museum (Scala Publishers: London: 2007)

·  "From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope," New Media, 1740-1915, Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, eds. (MIT Press, 2003)

·  James Goode and Laura Schiavo. Washington Images: Rare Maps and Prints from the Albert H. Small Collection (Bergamot Books, 2004)