Terry Drayman-Weisser

SCIART Senior Advisor

Contact Information

Conservator Emerita, Walters Art Museum; Former Director of Conservation and Technical Research

 

Terry Drayman-Weisser served as Director of Conservation and Technical Research at the Walters Art Museum for over 38 years. She received a Bachelor of Art in Art History from Swarthmore College, where she also studied the sciences and studio art. She took courses in physical metallurgy in the graduate program at Johns Hopkins University and received her diploma with distinction in archaeological conservation from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London. She has lectured and published widely and is known for her work with metals, enamels, and ivory. Her most recent publications include two articles in 2018 for Curator: The Museum Journal.

Ms. Weisser currently teaches identification and preservation of hard organic matrices at the Winterthur/University of Delaware Art Conservation Training Program. In the past, she taught metals conservation for several years and was part of a Walters Art Museum/University of Maryland team that was awarded a patent on a method for coating metal objects. Ms. Weisser is a past president, Fellow, and Honorary Member of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and has served on the Council of the International Institute for Conservation, where she also remains a Fellow. She received AIC’s Robert Feller Lifetime Achievement Award as well the Sheldon and Caroline Keck Award for mentoring conservators entering the field. Additionally, she has been involved with training conservators from Iraq and received the International Council of Museums-US Service Award for this work. She played a major role in establishing a conservation training program, the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage (IICAH) in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, with the mission to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage to international standards. She has taught courses at IICAH focusing on the treatment of ancient, flood-damaged Nimrud ivories. She is currently a member of the IICAH Advisory Council.