Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer

Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer received her PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. She now divides her time between teaching in the Department of Anthropology at SUNY Brockport and being the curator of the Morgan-Manning House, a Victorian dwelling and museum located in the heart of Western New York. After studying Chemical Engineering in Lille, France, and completing a MA in Greek & Latin at the University of Vermont, Rozenn has lately centered her research on the ancient Egyptians’ relationship with their environment, most especially with the animals that shared their lives. Her book on ancient Egyptian aviculture and poultry husbandry is scheduled to be released in the Fall. She has also worked as a consultant for the Art Institute of Chicago and the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, where she curated the exhibit Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt. Most recently, her move to the Victorian village of Brockport has motivated her to read the many letters and diaries that European and American travelers of the Victorian era wrote during their journeys through Egypt. She is eager to discover how these privileged members of western society described the people they met, as well as the sites, monuments, and landscapes that have since vanished. Finally, she simply loves sharing her passion for Egypt with fellow travelers and cannot wait to do so with you. Be prepared to admire birds along the way! She will have her binoculars and bird books!

Nicholas Brown

Nicholas (Nick) Brown is an American Egyptologist who has worked as an archaeologist in Egypt since 2011. He received his MA degree in Egyptology from the American University in Cairo in 2016, and currently is an Egyptology PhD candidate at the UCLA. Currently he lives between Los Angeles, CA and Cairo, Egypt. His excavation experience includes working with archaeological sites in Aswan (at Elephantine Island and Wadi el-Hudi), as well as funerary sites in Luxor, Amarna and the Sudan. In 2016, Nicholas spent the summer working at the MFA, Boston as the Terrace Curatorial Research Associate in Egyptology. He returned to the MFA over the summer of 2019 to conduct archival research for the Egyptian Art Department's exhibit "Ancient Nubia Now." Nicholas's research interests include royal funerary material culture from the New Kingdom, as well as the use and perception of ancient Egypt within modern contexts.

Huub Pragt

Huub Pragt received a MA in Egyptology from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and did an internship at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Immediately after his studies, he started working at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. For ten years he was engaged in education and public activities.

Peter Lacovara

Peter Lacovara (B.A. 1976, Boston University; Ph.D. 1993 The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago) is the Director of The Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund.  He was Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum from 1998 to 2014.  Previously he served as Assistant Curator in the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Currently, he is also Consulting Curator for the Egyptian Collection at the Albany Institute of History and Art and Visiting Research Scholar at the American University in Cairo.

Peter Lacovara has consulted and been engaged in museum installations and exhibitions at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Walters Art Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Worcester Art Museum, The Oriental Institute Museum and the at the Carnegie museum.

In addition, he has also taught at Syracuse University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Georgia State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been the W. K. Simpson Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo.

His archaeological fieldwork has included excavations at the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, the Palace-City of Amenhotep III at Malqata in Western Thebes, Abydos, Hierakonpolis and at the Giza Plateau, and currently he is directing the survey and restoration of the site of Deir el-Ballas.  His publications include studies on Daily Life and Urbanism in Ancient Egypt, Egyptian Mortuary Traditions, and the Material Culture of Ancient Egypt and Nubia.

Daniel Warne

Daniel Warne is a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at the University of Memphis.  The focus of his current research is the ritual function and classification of a largely royal iconographical motif dating to the New Kingdom.  He has studied, worked, and excavated in Egypt for nearly two decades.  He has worked with Egyptian collections at major museums in Egypt, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is currently an illustrator and digital epigrapher with the Theban Tomb 16 Project at Dra abu al-Naga.  His recent research projects include the scientific analysis of a Ptolemaic mummy, the study of the coffin of Ankhefenmut (an Egyptian priest of the 21st Dynasty, Bab el-Gasus cache), Egyptian Revival sphinxes, and Egyptian collections in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York.

Daniel Warne is a distinguished and passionate educator, earning him the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016.  He has taught numerous courses and seminars in archaeology, Egyptology, and cultural anthropology.  He enjoys travel and has led educational trips, taught overseas, and coordinated several study-abroad programs for university students.  He looks forward to being part of your tour through Egypt.

Peter Dorman

After receiving his PhD in Egyptology at the University of Chicago, Peter began a varied career as a curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time of the blockbuster Tutankhamun show and the reinstallation of the Met’s extensive Egyptian galleries. He was then offered a faculty position at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Civilizations of the University of Chicago to assume the position of field director of the Epigraphic Survey, a research expedition situated in Luxor for six months every year and dedicated to the precise documentation of ancient temple reliefs and inscriptions. In later years he returned to Chicago on a permanent basis to teach the language, history, and culture of ancient Egypt. Subsequently he served as the president of the American University of Beirut.

Author or editor of numerous publications on the history, archaeology, and epigraphy of the New Kingdom period, Peter’s interests have lain in the intersection of language, art, and material culture. He is perhaps best known for his research on the reign of Hatshepsut, the private tombs of western Thebes, and the Amarna period.

Annie Shanley

Annie Shanley received her PhD in Egyptian Art from Emory University, where her research focused on the role of the god Seth in New Kingdom royal monuments. For several years she taught art history at Emory University and the University of West Georgia. In 2014, Annie joined the staff of the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, where she specializes in researching the provenance (ownership history) of objects in the museum’s permanent collection. She lectures on ancient Egypt, as well as provenance and the ethics of collecting antiquities to both university classes and the general public across Atlanta. Annie has participated in archaeological field work at the tomb of Parennefer on the Theban West Bank, the Delta site of Mendes, Malkata (the palace site of Amenhotep III) in Thebes, and Tel Megiddo-East in Israel.

Amy Butner

Amy Butner received a PhD in Ancient Egyptian Art from Emory University and a Master’s in Egyptian Hieroglyphs from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Her dissertation focused on the decoration and design of the non-royal tombs of Amarna. More recently she completed a post doctoral fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In addition to traditional academic methodologies, Amy incorporates new technologies such as 3D printing, 3D scanning, and 3D modeling. Amy’s research has taken her all over the world at major academic institutions as well as on-site throughout Egypt. She has working knowledge of Egyptian Arabic and is fluent in German and Dutch. She has twice resided long term in Egypt and will be joining the archaeological team from The Met on their upcoming excavation at Dahshur!

Allan Langdale

Allan Langdale grew up on Vancouver Island wondering what the rest of the world was like and has spent much of his adult life finding out. Allan is an art and architectural historian, photographer, filmmaker, and travel writer who received his Ph.D. in art history from UC Santa Barbara. He has taught courses in Italian Renaissance art, Greek, Roman, Byzantine (including Georgian and Armenian architecture), and Indian and Islamic art and architecture. He currently teaches art history at UC Santa Cruz as a lecturer.

Along with several articles, Allan wrote the definitive architectural field guide to the little-known region of Turkish Cyprus, In a Contested Realm (2012) and also made the award-winning documentary film The Stones of Famagusta: the Story of a Forgotten City (2008). His travel books include Palermo: Travels in the City of Happiness (2015) and The Hippodrome of Istanbul / Constantinople: An Illustrated Handbook of its History (2019).

A popular Smithsonian Expert, Allan has traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, the Middle East—including Jordan and Egypt—and India.

David Price Williams

David Price Williams has a degree in Ancient Near Eastern languages and Classical Greek and a doctorate in Near Eastern archaeology and has spent his working life as an East Mediterranean archaeologist. His first overseas field work was in 1969 as a surveyor at the classical site of Knidos in Turkey. He then worked for the Smithsonian Institution before directing his own field research in the same area through the 1970’s. David has designed and lectured on many cruises to Greece, Turkey and the Near East. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an elected life member of the Society for Old Testament Studies.

Janet Duncan Jones

Janet Duncan Jones, Professor Emerita of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell University, is an archaeologist with over 40 years‘ experience in the field. She has participated in excavation projects in Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Jordan. Her experience as a glassblower out of college ignited a career long research interest in preindustrial technologies and the lives of early craft workers. While living in villages in the Middle East she became interested in the impacts of preindustrial technologies on the ancient environment and the evolution of cultural landscapes. Her publications include studies of the ancient glass from sites in Turkey and Jordan, and synthetic considerations of the landscape of ancient ruins and of the messages and impacts of ancient mega-engineering projects. Recently she has focused her work on the impact of the Moors in southern Spain on urbanism, architecture, technology, and intellectual history.

Janet has lived in Turkey and Greece, and has traveled widely with an eye toward the messages that landscapes send us about the values and concerns of past peoples. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also acquired a devotion to ACC basketball. She lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania with her geographer husband and hounds descended from those she originally imported from the Euphrates Valley in southeastern Turkey. 

Rita Freed

Rita Freed received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M. A. and Ph. D. in Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.  She was Associate Professor of Art at the University of Memphis and founding Director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology before coming to the MFA, Boston, to head the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art, a position she now holds as Emerita.  She also teaches Egyptian and Nubian Art at Wellesley College and to underserved at risk high school students through the Seymour Institute.

Freed has excavated in Egypt at numerous sites from the Delta to Karnak as well as in Israel and Cyprus.  The exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include Egypt’s Golden Age, A Divine Tour of Ancient Egypt, Ramesses the Great, Pharaohs of the Sun, The Secrets of Tomb 10A and Ancient Nubia Now. 

Recently she was the Richard D. Cohen Fellow in Art History at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, where she pursued research in Nubian art and developed methods to make it more widely available.  She is currently working on a book entitled Ancient Nubian Art:  A History.

Iman Nagy

Iman is a seasoned field archaeologist and surveyor that specializes in North African landscape archaeology with a special focus on rock art. She holds a Master's degree in Egyptology and Northeast African archaeology. Her doctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles examines the relationship of geomorphological influence on ancient religious ideologies. For the past decade, she has worked on projects in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and also has extensive experience in Southeast Asia, with projects in the Philippines and Cambodia. Following her passion for the spectacular rock art landscapes across North Africa, she continues to work at sites ranging from the early neolithic to contemporary periods. Public education and demystifying archaeology is another major passion for Iman, who loves to share her unique insights from the field. 

Debora Heard

Debora Heard is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology specializing in Nubian Archaeology at the University of Chicago where she has also extensively studied the ancient Egyptian language and history. Her dissertation research analyzes the inscriptions and iconography of Kushite temples dedicated to the gods Amun and Apedemak in Upper Nubia. She situates her research at the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, Egyptology, and Nubian Studies.

Debora has excavated at the 4th Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan as a member of the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition. For more than 10 years, she has taught courses, given public lectures, and participated in special programming dedicated to ancient Nubia and Egypt at the Oriental Institute, the Kemetic Institute, Chicago State University and, most recently, the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Her audiences have included grade school children, college students, school teachers, museum docents, and general members of the public seeking information about the ancient world. Debora has also served as an intern with the Egyptian and Nubian Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and curatorial assistant in the installation of the Robert F. Picken Family Nubian Gallery of the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, as well as conducted research at the British Museum, Ashmolean Museum, and the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford. She looks forward to sharing her passion for Egypt and Nubia with the Smithsonian Journeys tours.

Natasha Ayers

Natasha Ayers received her PhD in Egyptian Archaeology from the University of Chicago. She has almost 20 years of experience working on excavations across Egypt, and she is the ceramicist for Middle Kingdom through New Kingdom pottery at Tell Edfu. Natasha is excited to show you Edfu on the tour!

Currently, she is a senior postdoctoral research fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAW) in Vienna, where she received a research grant from the Austrian Science Fund for her project “Communities Reassembled – Rethinking Identity in Ancient Egypt.” Natasha is a specialist in the material culture of the Second Millennium BCE, and her research focuses on using artifacts in combination with anthropological theory to better understand the complexities of identity and community in ancient Egypt.

Previously, Natasha designed and taught courses in the archaeology of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean for the Adult Education Programs at Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute), and taught undergraduate courses at the University of Chicago. She also has collaborated on publication projects with numerous museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley.

Ashley Arico

Ashley Arico received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies with a focus in Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology from the Johns Hopkins University, where her research examined Egyptian statues as evidence for interactions between Egypt and the Levant in ancient times. She is currently the Associate Curator of Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ashley participated in excavations at the temple of the lioness-headed goddess Mut in Luxor, Egypt for several years, and she has previously held positions at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her interests include tracing how Egyptian artifacts have moved and been interpreted over time from antiquity to today, and particularly in how tourism to Egypt in the late 19th century influenced the formation of Egyptian museum collections throughout the world, including in Chicago.

Betsy Bryan

Betsy Bryan is the Professor Emerita of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University where she continues to teach and work with the Archaeological Museum. Betsy received her doctorate from Yale University’s Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Department and there established her lifelong interest in Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty and New Kingdom, ca. 1600 to 1069 B.C.E., as she wrote her dissertation on Tutankhamun’s great grandfather Thutmose IV. Interested in both Egyptian texts and arts from the beginning, she was fortunate to join both the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and at the same time the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ancient Arts Department as Co-Curator with Arielle Kozloff of the exhibition Egypt’s Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep III and his World. That exhibition opened in 1992 and traveled to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth and the Grand Palais of the Louvre in Paris. In 2002 she organized an exhibition with the National Gallery of Art, The Quest for Immortality, borrowed entirely from Egypt, and it traveled in North America for seven years. 

In 1993 Betsy began an epigraphic project in the unfinished painted tomb of the Royal Butler to Amenhotep II, Suemniwet in Thebes where she studied the painting techniques at work. In 2001 she began to excavate at the Temple of the Goddess Mut on the East side of Thebes, and she remains working at that site today where she studies the temple’s architecture, cult rituals, the hundreds of Sekhmet statues, and the archaeological evidence unearthed representing the support buildings to the temple in the reigns from Queen Hatshepsut to Akhenaten located behind the Sacred Lake of the temple.

Betsy has published and contributed to numerous books in addition to those on Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, and her familiarity with Thebes is deep and long. She has appeared in a number of documentaries and recently in the subscription series Real Ancient Egypt by Wondrium (former Great Courses). Betsy has a passion for Egypt and has shared that love with the public throughout her career.