Christina Cadenhead

PRESENTLY

I'm a recent graduate of the Museology program at the University of Washington in Seattle and am excited to begin my career in the museum field. I am currently working at the Museum of History & Industry in Seattle as a Collections Assistant. The museum is at the tail-end of a massive move from their current location to two separate facilities (public museum and off-site storage) and I help to track and re-locate every object to it's new shelf in the new storage space. I've also snagged an elusive in-house evaluation postion at Pacific Science Center. My manager and I are excited to grow the culture of evaluation at the institution and will be working with many departments on a wide variety of public facing as well as master planning projects.

PREVIOUSLY

For my thesis project, I worked with the UW Botanic Gardens to write interpretive signage for one of their new forest gardens. The signage encourages visitors to seek out the subtle beauty and unusal physical features that make the area unique and that many folks from the Pacific Northwest may take for granted. Additionally, I inventoried all the current signs in the Washington Park Arboretum and started a database that should assist with future interpretive writing and planning.

I also worked with a classmate on a 9 month long, client-based audience research project at the Seattle Aquarium. We investigated what visitors knew and didn't know about harbor seals and observed how they used the harbor seal habitat area. As part of this apprenticeship-based learning model, we trained 10 first year students to assist with our data collection. Our findings are informing the interpretive materials that will be a part of the current harbor seal habitat renovation. A poster summarizing our findings was presented at the 2012 Visitor Studies Association conference in Raleigh, NC.

Check out the links below for more info on the sites I have, and do, work with.

Be knowledgeable. Love what you do. Share it with others.
- Starbucks, 5 Ways of Being