Nayla Maaruf

Nayla Maaruf joined the Department of Conservation and Science in 2019 as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow after finishing her master’s in conservation at West Dean College. She studied for her undergraduate degree in conservation at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland, where she wrote her thesis on the development of the tannin process in photography and its influences on romanticism. Nayla has a range of conservation experiences: she has worked as a collection management assistant at the Leuven city archive, as assistant conservator on a project in the Arctic, and as a research intern at the University of Leuven Book Heritage Lab. As a photograph conservator at the Art Institute, she has been involved in preparing photographs for display, performing stabilizing treatments on incoming works, and engaging in historical and analytical research into the collection (e.g., a pair of Japanese Albums and color prints in the collection).