Heather was born and raised in Iowa and introduced to history from an early age by her father who would take her and her sister on vacation to explore his deep interest in Native American tribes of the Great Plains, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and quirky small-town museums.
Heather majored in History at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa and went on to grad school to get an MA in Museum Studies at University College London in 2007. Her first job was assistant collections manager with the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites in the small town of New Harmony which is the site of two failed utopian communities. There she took care of twelve historic buildings/houses, two historic object collections, and two archives. She did everything from cataloguing to coordinating historical preservation work to installing sump pumps and escorting confused animals and various reptiles out of buildings.
Prior to joining the JSE&A Catalogue Department, Heather spent 11 years as the collections manager for The George Washington Foundation in Fredericksburg, Virginia. In addition to caring for the objects at Kenmore and Ferry Farm, George Washington’s boyhood home, she assisted in the restoration and furnishing of Kenmore and the recreation of Ferry Farm over the site of the original house. While at the GWF she gained a deep knowledge of the collections and archives through the study of 18th century decorative arts, glassware, and ceramics. Oddly enough, Heather first worked with JSE&A over a decade ago, in fact meeting with Will Kimbrough the first month she started at the Foundation to perform reappraisals of the entire collection.