Joanna Cole

Joanna Cole
Assistant Curator (Object Collections and Provenance)

Job summary

Joanna is Assistant Curator in the Object Collections section of the Museum, with an especial focus on collections provenance work.

Joanna loves working with objects, textiles and photographs from all parts of the world, but she has a particular interest in archaeological and ethnographic collections from Central and South America, and South and Southeast Asia. 

CV

Joanna studied at University College London, receiving a BA in Archaeology in 2010 and an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2012. In the latter, she combined Anglo-Saxon archaeology, languages and literature.

After graduating, Joanna volunteered and worked for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, recording archaeological finds made by members of the public. She first joined the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2016, working on a project to pack and catalogue the Museum’s reserve collections, before moving to the British Museum to work on a similar move project. She returned to the Pitt Rivers Museum as Assistant Curator of Object Collections in June 2018, and has since then worked on the CMS-DAMS, Multaka, and Talking Threads project – an Arts Council England funded project that aimed to digitise and enhance the documentation of the clothing and textile collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum and engage originating communities and weavers. There was a focus on three geographical regions: Nagaland in India, the Pacific Northwest of America, and the Middle East.

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