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= Susan Wilson = Susan Wilson is an award-winning photographer, author, multimedia artist, educator, and public historian, based since 1976 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House in Boston,[1] a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center in Waltham,[2] and the owner/photographer of Susan Wilson Photo in Cambridge[3] Born Susan Carolyn Relyea in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Madison, New Jersey, she attended Tufts University (Medford, Massachusetts) where she received a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) and M.A. in history, then completed her PhD coursework. She left graduate school to study photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and to work as a framing instructor at Frameworks in Cambridge. In addition to performing in folk music groups and rock bands from ages fourteen through twenty-four, Susan taught seventh grade social studies in Columbia, Missouri, as well as European and Russian history at Tufts, while pursuing her graduate degrees. During her time at the Museum School, she was tapped to write and photograph for Boston’s two feminist newspapers, both of which emerged at the height of the women’s movement. Her work as Music Editor of Equal Times and Photo Editor of Sojourner attracted the attention of The Boston Globe, where she began freelancing in 1978. Hundreds of her stories and images focusing on women performers, the arts, entertainment, history, and culture appeared in the Globe from 1978 to 1996. During her last nine years at the Globe, her regular Boston history columns included the popular “Sites and Insights” and “History Notebook.”

Susan’s years as a photojournalist specializing in musical events helped grow her profile in the Boston photographic community. In 1981, she began a decade of teaching photojournalism at the New England School of Photography (NESOP), then founded the school’s Crosscurrents seminar series, which she directed for another twenty years.[4] She served as the official house photographer at the Cambridge folk music club, Passim, from the late 1970s until its original owners retired in 1995. For two decades beginning in 1994, she was the primary portrait photographer for honors ensembles and other classical musicians at the New England Conservatory of Music, an annual tradition she later extended to students and faculty at the Longy School of Music.

In the process, Susan gained national recognition for her lively portraiture, taken both in her Cambridge studio and on location, of hundreds of well-known performers including Rebecca Parris, Bill Harley, the Lydian String Quartet, Keith Lockhart, Sanford Sylvan, D’Anna Fortunato, Pete Seeger, Bill Morrissey, Holly Near, Ronnie Gilbert, Taj Mahal, Alison Krauss, and Patty Larkin, as well as her images of literary artists such as Adrienne Rich, Anita Diamant, and Stephen McCauley. Throughout her career, Susan’s photographic artwork has been exhibited in dozens of solo and group shows in both Greater Boston and on Cape Cod.

Her history columns for The Boston Globe laid the foundation for her many books of stories and images on Boston history. A contributing author for Boston and the American Revolution and Symphony Hall: The First 100 Years, she is best known for her solo volumes:[5]

Boston Sites and Insights: A Multicultural Guide to 50 Historic Landmarks in and Around Boston (Beacon Press, 1994).

Garden of Memories: A Guide to Historic Forest Hills (Forest Hills Educational Trust, 1998)

Literary Trail of Greater Boston (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

The Omni Parker House: A Brief History of America’s Longest Continuously Operating Hotel (Omni Parker House, 2000).

Boston Sites and Insights: An Essential Guide to Historic Landmarks In and Around Boston (Beacon Press, Revised and Updated Edition, 2004)

The Literary Trail of Greater Boston: A Tour of Sites in Boston, Cambridge, and Concord (Commonwealth Editions, Revised and Updated Edition, 2005)

The Omni Parker House: A Brief History of America’s Longest Continuously Operating Hotel (Omni Parker House, Expanded 150th Anniversary Edition, 2008).

Heaven By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House (The Omni Parker House, 2014)

Tales from the Old Corner: Celebrating 300 Years (Historic Boston Incorporated, 2018)

Throughout her decades of research on Boston history, Susan consulted with, worked for, and served on select boards of many of Boston's historic organizations, including the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail,[6] the Old South Meetinghouse, the Dimock Center, Boston HarborWalk, the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail,[7] the National Park Service, Boston By Foot, and the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative. She researched, wrote, and delivered PowerPoint lectures or walking tours for a variety of groups, including the Omni Parker House, Brandeis University, the Old South Meetinghouse, ArtWeek Boston, The Boston Literary Cultural District, Forest Hills Educational Trust, Lahey Health, Primary Source, RoadScholar, the Boston Athenaeum, Tufts University, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Longy School of Music.

For a dozen years beginning in 2005, she collaborated with the Old South Meetinghouse to present an annual history quiz extravaganza known as “The Fife Is Right,” which was frequently featured on the WGBH Forum Network.[8] A longtime member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Susan researched and wrote the historic kiosk signage on Boston Common for the City of Boston (1996), headed a team of researchers, visual artists, and designers to develop The Maritime Museum at Battery Wharf and Harbor Walk signage in Boston's North End (2008),[9] and was historic consultant to Lahey Health for the development of their History Wall in Burlington, Massachusetts (2017).[10]

Susan has combined her love for history, world culture, imagery, and storytelling as Artistic Director for the multimedia company, Melodic Vision. Among the shows she performed and toured with co-director Rebecca Strauss are Noche de Muertos (chronicling Mexico's most popular holiday, the Day of the Dead) and Sacred Grounds, Sacred Sounds (featuring the music and musicians of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris). Melodic Vision’s award-winning video, Iluminación, was a featured selection at the Provincetown International Film Festival in 2011. Other of Melodic Vision’s recent multimedia works include The Boston Women’s Memorial and a profile of Dr. Pedro Del Nido, the latter for Children’s Hospital, Boston.[11]

Since 2016, Susan Wilson has been a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she is researching and writing a biography, Women and Children First: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Susan Dimock (1847–75).