In just a few sentences, please tell us about your current job.
I’m a Children’s Librarian for the New Orleans Public Library. I work with kids birth-12 years old. I get to spend a lot of time reading and evaluating children’s books, planning Storytimes and other Early Literacy Programs (where I hand make a LOT of props and plan very fun art projects for kids under 5) and run programs for school age kids including lots of art programs where we learn about artists and create artwork in their styles. I do a lot of committee work as well, right now I’m a member of the American Library Association’s Great Graphic Novels for kids list, where we read, evaluate and create a booklist of the best newly published graphic novels.
How did your time at SMFA influence your career journey?
I’ve always loved the library, and my time at SMFA was no different. I mostly worked in photography and performance art, and a huge part of my artistic practice has always been research- visual, historical, contextual. I absolutely fell in love with Darin Murphy’s job- helping artists research sounded like such a dream job. I also really fell in love with academic writing at this time due to some of the amazing professors at Tufts, and so I decided to go to UT Austin so I could get a dual degree in Women and Gender Studies with an emphasis on Queer Studies while obtaining my Masters of Science in Information Studies.
What advice would you offer to a student who wants to pursue a career path like yours?
- Use the library! Explore the SMFA library and use all its resources ( especially staff like Darin!). You cannot beat the access to resources you have as a student! But don’t forget the public library and what they have to offer as well.
- Explore, explore, explore!! There’s a lot of different types of library jobs out there. I went to school thinking I would be an academic/art librarian and ended up a Children’s Librarian! So try out new and different things as much as you can. I tried a little bit of everything at SMFA until I really found my niche. In grad school I also had a ton of choices for coursework, and explored everything. I took classes in archives and preservation, public librarianship and academic librarianship. Having a bunch of different skill sets is really very helpful, both at my current job, and if I wanted to look for different types of work. You may fall in love with something completely different than you thought.
- Apply to different library schools! They can be really different, and offer you really different coursework and skill sets.
- There’s going to be so many ways an art school education will follow and help you in a career, even if it doesn’t seem like it on the surface. 😉
