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= Elaine Heumann Gurian  = Elaine Heumann Gurian (born September 23, 1937), is a museum professional who works with institutions that are beginning, building or reinventing themselves. Ms. Gurian is focused on allowing native and minority peoples to tell their narratives.

Biography
Ms. Heumann Gurian was born to German Jewish immigrants; her father, Ernst, was one of the first residential housing developers in the United States. She grew up on Long Island and attended Brandeis University, where she met her first husband, Bennett Gurian, with whom she has three children. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Brandeis and a Master’s in elementary education from State College, Boston. She was the elementary art teacher at Solomon Schecter School in Newton, MA. In the wake of civil unrest in Boston, she began work as a community organizer, volunteering to teach art in a mobile unit in Boston for Summerthing, a summer program run by Mayor Kevin White. She also brought art projects to Boston area television as “Miss Elaine” on the Boston Romper Room franchise.

Museum Work
Ms. Gurian has had a long career as a museum professional, in a variety of staff and leadership positions as well as a pioneering consultant. Her museum career began at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1969. She spent 16 years (1971-1987) as a member of the leadership team of the Boston Children’s Museum, helping to guide that institution to focus on its core audience of children and families.

In 1987 she moved to Washington, DC and joined the Smithsonian Institution, serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Museums and as the Deputy Director for Public Program Planning at the National Museum of the American Indian (1987-1990).

She then assisted in the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, serving as Deputy Director of that institution, before becoming the acting director of the Cranbrook Institute of Science.

She is a founding member of The Museum Group, a consortium of museum professionals. As a consultant, she has worked with museums throughout the world, including the National Museum of Australia; the National Children’s Museum, Washington, D.C; The National Museum of Australia; CIRMA, the National Archive of Guatemala; Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand; the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the Jewish Museum, Berlin; the Museum of the Resistance, Dominican Republic, the National Discovery Museum, Thailand; among many others.

Teaching and Scholarship
Ms. Gurian has taught at universities, institutes, and museums around the world and regularly leads training sessions for museum and cultural executives and staff. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan; has taught at Museion, the University of Gothenburg’s museum graduate program. She has trained faculty for the Fund for Arts and Culture, Romania and has conducted training sessions in the Ukraine on behalf of the US State Department. In addition, she regularly lectures at museum studies programs and has been a keynote speaker at many international museum conferences.

She is widely published, with articles published in scholarly journals and professional journals, working papers, and edited volumes. Civilizing the Museum collects her essays on the role of museums as public spaces and articulates her argument that museums have an obligation to open their doors and collections to the entire community in which they are situated and whom they serve.

Boston Stories: The Children's Museum As a Model for Nonprofit Leadership provides a window into the transformation of the Boston Children’s Museum, serving as a resource for those interested in the potential of museums as organizations dedicated to self-directed learning.

Awards
Heumann Gurian is a 2006 inductee into the American Association of Museums Centennial Honor Roll. She has also been received AAM’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service to Museums Award.

Ms. Gurian was awarded a Fulbright Scholar to train museum professional at Fundacion TyPA, Argentina. She has been an Osher Fellow (Exploratorium, San Francisco); Salzburg Scholar; an a fellow at the Georgia O’Keefe museum.

The Lab School of Washington selected her as its Outstanding Learning Disabled Achiever in 1993 and she has been recognized by Brandeis University with its Distinguished Service Alumni Award.

Photography
Ms. Gurian is an avid photographer, who is known to take intense photographs of the local architecture, texturing, and nature of whichever country she finds herself in. In her own words, “ I shoot constantly when I wander about because the art for me is in the cropping and editing. I think of it like I did in art school -- composing, coloring, and detailing.”