Lara Kaplan

Biography

Lara (she/her) received her M.S. in Art Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) in 2003, majoring in objects conservation. To foster an interest in conserving indigenous cultural materials, she interned in Sitka, Alaska at the Sheldon Jackson Museum, and in Tucson, Arizona at the Arizona State Museum and the National Park Service Western Archaeological and Conservation Center. She then held a post-graduate Mellon Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. the year their museum building opened on the National Mall. 

Lara opened a private conservation business in 2005, working with institutions and private clients in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Conservation education has also been a key part of her work. In addition to leading courses and guest lecturing at universities in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area, she also served as a long-time affiliated faculty member at WUDPAC, supervising student projects and teaching advanced seminars on specialized topics. Since 2017, she has led the organic objects portion of the first-year curriculum. 

Lara joined the staff at Winterthur Museum in 2019, where she cares for collection objects and continues to contribute to teaching at WUDPAC. In both roles, Lara emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and issues of diversity and inclusion. Her research interests include the conservation and analysis of organic materials, especially skin and leather, the identification and treatment of plastics, and ethical considerations in the conservation of non-traditional collections. 

With fellow conservators Ellen Carrlee and Caitlin Mahony, Lara is currently coediting a new textbook, Caring for Plant Based Material Culture: A Conservation Handbook, to be published by Routledge in 2026.​