This is a first for Albany’s New York State Museum (NYSM)—charting its own history by appointing its first woman director, Jennifer Saunders, to lead the nearly 200-year-old institution.
NYSM is the oldest and largest public museum in the US. Its broad range of collections span science, history, archaeology and anthropology, overflowing with more than 20 million artefacts, from a billion years ago to today.
A virtual press conference was held on Monday 14 July to announce Saunders’s appointment. “I'm excited to work with the staff and be able to utilise the amazing collection at the museum to showcase all the stories that New York has to offer,” Saunders said at the event. She noted that she is also looking forward to discovering more about her own family history in New York dating back to the Revolutionary War.
Saunders will take the reins at NYSM in September, following 14 years as director of the Washington State Historical Society and Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. “I'm certainly aware that what we consider deep history in Washington is relatively young on the East Coast,” Saunders said. “I think that the approach to history is consistent, no matter where you are—or at least the approach that I embrace, and that's promoting a whole history.”
During her tenure in Washington State, Saunders doubled her organisation’s operating budget, expanded services and launched public programming such as Black History in Washington—a multiplatform initiative with resources for educators, a digital app and a permanent monument to the early Black Pacific Northwest settler George Bush at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia.
New York State Museum, Albany Photo: Matt Wade via Wikimedia Commons
Earlier in her career, Saunders served as executive director of the Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor, Washington. Saunders has academic degrees in politics and economics from the University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
“I think we knocked it out of the park,” Michael Mastroianni, the acting director of NYSM, said of Saunders’s appointment. Mastroianni has been filling in since former director Mark Schaming retired last summer after 37 years at the helm.
While it is too early to talk specifics about the museum’s future, a look back at the past decade reveals an ongoing struggle between the state education department and New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office on renovation plans and funding.
At Monday’s press conference, Saunders said she had “no trepidation” about collaborating with state entities. “It's very clear that the commissioner, the governor, the legislature and the community care deeply about this institution and want to see it succeed,” she said, “and that's what excites me about the position: to come in and work collaboratively with all of the stakeholders to craft that vision, and then to execute on that vision.”