Bruno P. Pouliot
Associate Conservator of Objects
and Adjunct Assistant Professor
Bruno received his B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Laval University in Quebec City in 1979. He became interested in the field of conservation during an excavation of a Roman monument in Carthage, Tunisia and received in 1983 his Master’s Degree in Art Conservation from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
He completed several internships and specialized in the conservation of objects, with an emphasis in the field of ethnographic conservation and in the decorative arts. His internships took him from Calgary’s Glenbow Museum in the Canadian prairies to the Fowler’s Museum of Cultural History at the University of California in Los Angeles, and finally to conservation research centers in France and Germany. In 1985 he was an instructor for one of the ICCROM courses on the conservation of wooden objects that was taught in West Africa.
From 1986 to 1991, he served as one of only two conservators working in the Canadian Arctic, at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. From 1991 to 1997, he served as Objects Conservator and then Head of Conservation at the newly reopened McCord Museum in Montreal. Bruno made several presentations on his work at international and national conferences, and in 1996 he was the coordinator for the annual workshop of the Canadian Association for Conservation, whose theme was integrated pest management.
In 1997 he joined the staff of Winterthur Museum and now serves as Objects Conservator and Associate Professor for the Art Conservation Program, which is jointly sponsored by Winterthur and the University of Delaware. Besides coordinating the activities of the Objects Conservation Laboratory, and serving as leader of the Preventive Conservation Team, Bruno teaches about objects conservation, particularly organic materials and preventive conservation. He has published several articles on ethical issues related to the conservation of culturally sensitive materials, and on various projects related to the conservation of ethnographic collections. He currently serves as French Editor for the abstracts of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC), and also as Editor for the Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts Online. In June 2007, he was lead organizer and instructor for the AIC workshop “Assessing the Skin: Characterizing the Animal Source, Processing Method, and Deterioration of Museum and Library Objects”.
