Reyhane Mirabootalebi

​​began September 2​​016

Reyhane earned her M.A degree in Cultural Materials Conservation from the University of Melbourne in 2011. She has been working as an objects and textiles conservator since 2010 in a number of cultural institutions including the Conservation Consultancy Services for the University of Melbourne, the National Museum of Australia, the Heritage Conservation Center in Singapore, and the National Museum of Kabul. Reyhane was an academic and teaching assistant at the Center for Cultural Materials Conservation, at the University of Melbourne. She also worked independently on community-based conservation projects such as the Narrabeen War Memorial Museum Project, the Warmun Indigenous Art Center Project, and the Islamic Museum of Australia. Reyhane was involved most recently as a consulting conservator in the Partnership Project, a major cultural heritage project administered by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago at the National Museum of Afghanistan Kabul.  There she had the opportunity to work on the archaeological and ethnographic collections of the National Museum, which had been severely affected by looting and destruction due to intensive conflicts in the country over the last four decades. The main focus of her work at the National Museum was on training of the Afghan conservators in all aspects of care, conservation treatment and preservation of the collections.

Reyhane passed her passed her exams in December 2017 and her proposal presentation in May 2018, and is now working on her dissertation. Her dissertation committee members are Vicki Cassman (ARTC) and Patricia Sloane-White (ANTH; Chair, Women and Gender Studies), co-chairs; Margaret Stetz (ENGL; Mae & Robert Carter Professor, Women and Gender Studies), Rudolph Matthee (HIST, John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History), and Sumru Krody (external member; Senior Curator, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum).

TOPIC: Traditional Kurdish Textiles: Cultural Interweaving and Unraveling

Reyhane’s research focuses on preservation strategies and the impacts of ongoing regional conflicts on Kurdish textile traditions in Northern Iraq. She will investigate material qualities such as changes in creation, production, design, material choice, and function; and immaterial qualities of the art form, such as artists’ (women’s) agency, ritual and spiritual uses, and local cultural heritage institutional roles (men’s agency) for maintaining these traditions. Factors such as loss of human lives, relocation, destruction or limited access to habitats, and economic instability, will be explored in the context of potential maintenance, redevelopment or regeneration of traditional practices.