President

F. Carey Howlett is a conservator with more than 45 years of experience in the conservation of historic furniture and architectural interiors. He is president and chief conservator of F. Carey Howlett & Associates, a firm providing services to museums, historic sites and private clients. He is a graduate of the Smithsonian Program in Furniture Conservation and served in the conservation department at Colonial Williamsburg for fourteen years, where he was director of conservation from 1998-2001.

Secretary

Jane Hohensee, the Senior Registrar at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, is responsible for documenting and managing their artifact collection and inward loans exhibited at the Foundation’s museums.  Prior to that, Jane worked at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for eight years as the assistant and then associate registrar in the department of collections. In her nearly thirty-year museum career, Jane has had the opportunity to coordinate many conservation projects with specialist conservators. Jane is dedicated to artifact preservation and looks forward to working on the VCA Board in the position of Secretary.  She lives in Williamsburg with her husband and their rescued beagle. In her spare time, she likes spending time outdoors and reading.

Treasurer

Caroline Rawls is the Conservation Technician for Paintings at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a role she has occupied for the past two years. Some of her responsibilities include minor treatment for paintings and frames in the collection, prepping works for in-house display or loan, and processing images for digital archiving. Before this position, she volunteered in the VMFA’s conservation lab to expand their FTIR reference spectra database and later became an NEH summer conservation intern. In 2024, she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. in Chemistry and an additional major in French & Francophone Studies. Caroline is a Virginia native, growing up in Mechanicsville. She has been a member of the VCA since 2025 and looks forward to taking on a more active role in the association. In her spare time, she enjoys outdoor sports, playing piano, and watching foreign films.

Outreach Chair

Nora Bloch is the Collections Care Librarian & Conservator for Virginia Commonwealth  University Libraries. She specializes in books and paper and especially enjoys teaching book repair to the incredibly talented Collections Care Technicians who are VCU student workers. She holds her B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz, her M.L.I.S. from the University of California Los Angeles, and her M.A. in Conservation Studies, specializing in books and paper, from West Dean College of Arts, Design, Craft and Conservation in England.

Programs

Maeve was born and raised in the Isle of Man. Maeve trained to be a conservator at London Guildhall University. After graduating in 2000 she moved to Scotland, to work with Glasgow Museums on the conservation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Ingram Street Tearoom, then with Historic Scotland on murals by Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852 -1936).

She moved to the USA in 2006 to work with Colonial Williamsburg on the restoration of the Carolina Room, a c.1836 folk art interior. In 2009, she co-founded Black Creek Workshop LLC, a preservation contractor specializing in the conservation and restoration of historic architecture. Since 2018 she has worked independently on a wide range of painted and polychrome surfaces projects for private clients, museums, institutions and churches.

Most recently, she recreated the original decorative paint scheme in the passages and parlor at Wilton House Museum (C.1753), Richmond, and in 2026 she will begin the restoration of Wilton’s exterior painted woodwork.

Publications

Lauren Gottschlich is an objects conservator at The Mariners’ Museum and Park.  There she works on and cares for maritime cultural heritage objects such as models, figureheads, and instruments.  She has a Master’s degree in objects conservation and a minor in preventive conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.  Prior to arriving at The Mariners’ Museum and Park, she worked at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum as an objects conservator for their renovation project.  

Membership Chair

Olivia Bascle is the manager of Preventive Conservation in the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s (CWF) Historic Area. Using preventive conservation practices, her team cares for over 35 original and reconstructed 18th century properties as well as collections storage and warehouse spaces. Olivia works with many departments to ensure preservation needs are considered. Through her work at CWF, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and an internship at George Mason’s Gunston Hall, Olivia has years of experience with collections care and preventive project planning. She holds a BA in Anthropology from George Mason University and completed the Heritage Emergency and Response Training in 2022 run by the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative and FEMA.