By Kelsey Brownlee
On Thurs., Nov. 3, the interior design students gladly welcomed Olivia Alison.
Alison is a native of Selma, Alabama, who has earned art history degrees from Hollins College and the University of Delaware, as well as a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris. She began her career as a field representative for the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem and worked at the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, Winterthur Museum and the Birmingham Museum of Art.
In 1989 she became Curator of Decorative Arts for Savannah’s Telfair Museum of Art. Alison was also the director of the Telfair’s Owens-Thomas House museum and its multi-million dollar architectural conservation project.
In 1999, she joined Colonial Williamsburg as Director of Major Gifts for Collections, Conservation and Museums. In addition she was co-founder and the Director of the Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections.
For six years she worked with Williamsburg’s curators, conservators and development staff to attract world class objects and collections to the Foundation and to garner support for the Foundation’s museums, trade shops, architectural restorations and educational programs. She then worked at Monticello as the Vice President of External Affairs for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and at Old Salem in Winston-Salem, NC, as a consultant.
She returned to her native state in 2007 and became the Director of Development for the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. In 2014, she joined the Birmingham Public Library to help strengthen its funds development program.
She is currently the Director of Development for the Birmingham Public Library system, and her office is in the historic Linn-Henley Research Library. She is delighted to be associated with the largest public library in Alabama, which is also the most visited cultural institution in the county and the official repository of the city of Birmingham’s history.