Janna is an experienced digital asset manager with a passion for implementing organizational structures (she is, after all, a virgo), developing productive workflows, and creating robust metadata schemas that maximize end user experience. Her interest in asset management was fostered through her prior work as a cataloger, researcher, archivist, and taxonomist at institutions including the Smith College Museum of Art, Hollyhock House, the Center for Brooklyn History, the Tenement Museum, MoMA Art Library, David Zwirner, and Marquee Brands. She has been with the University of Maryland for a little over a year as the Digital Asset Manager and Digital Archivist in the Office of Marketing and Communications. She can often be heard telling her UMD coworkers "if you can't find something, come find me!"
She earned her MS in Library Information Sciences with honors from the Pratt Institute in 2021 where she focused on cataloging practices and collection accessibility. She presented research at ARLIS NA in 2020 and 2021 on art library cataloging procedures and how to use unique tags, search terms, and subject headings to better reflect diversity within collections. "From this research, her article "Why Have There Been No Great Art Libraries: The Role of Radical Cataloging in the Reassessment of Art History" was published in Art Documentation Fall 2021."
Janna also earned her MA in Art History from Hunter College in 2023 where she specialized in 20th century female artists. Her thesis "Death Becomes Her: Rejecting the Muse and Reclaiming the Female Body in Leonor Fini's Skeleton Women" explored the ways Fini used death iconography to reimagine traditional binaries and challenge the social constructs that dictate gender presentation, sexual expression, and self-fashioning. When Janna is home from being your friendly neighborhood digital asset manager, she can be found reading, writing about, or discussing the macabre, spending time with her cats Mable and Merlot, feeding birds on her balcony, cultivating a tiny herb garden, or partaking in various crafts.