Kelly McHugh recently became the Supervisory Collections Manager at the National Museum of the American Indian. Prior she served as an object conservator, when she began working for the museum in 1996 in New York, based at the museum’s former storage facility in the Bronx. There she participated in a survey of the over 800,000 objects in NMAI’s collection, prior to the collections move to the Cultural Resources Center in Maryland. As a Conservator she played an active role in the development of collaborative conservation practices for the care of Native American collections. Her responsibilities include preventive conservation, preparing collection items for exhibition, and researching materials from gutskin to glass disease. She worked closely with her colleagues to implement the Conservation department’s post -graduate Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. She received her MA Art History with a Certificate in Conservation from New York University, Institute of Fine Arts and her BA in Art History and Peace and Global Policy Studies again from New York University.