Irene Chambers
Director, Interpretive
Library of Congress
Programs Office
101 Indepenence Ave. SE
Washington DC
20540
USA
http://www.loc.gov
Irene Chambers is the Chief of the Interpretive Programs Office (IPO) and has more than thirty-five years of experience working in the museum and cultural world. She has worked in history and art museums and with other cultural institutions and organizations in program planning, development, and exhibitions. Since 1990, she has been responsible for bringing the resources of the Library of Congress, to a broad public through exhibitions, on-line presentations, and educational programs that reveal the Library's unique nature and collections.
New initiatives since her tenure include the development of a traveling exhibition program, that, to date, has reached four million people, 115 venues, ninety cities, and forty-three states in the United States alone, and internationally, twenty-one venues, ten foreign countries, and four continents. She also established an electronic outreach effort that includes fifty-five online exhibits, at present, and reaches millions of viewers each month, and has overseen the growth of the exhibition program to include 30,000 square feet of ongoing and special exhibitions.
Under her direction, IPO has planned and realized several series of major exhibitions. These include the "Great Libraries/Written Traditions" series that features the collections of the world's major intellectual repositories and explores their contributions to the life of the mind and written culture. To date, this series has included: Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture; Scrolls from the Dead Sea: The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Scholarship; Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque nationale de France; and John Bull and Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British-American Relations. Another series, "Reviewing the Past Century," examines the events, movements, and individuals that shaped the twentieth century. Among the exhibits in this series are Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture and The World of Charles and Ray Eames, both of which toured Europe, the U.S., and other parts of the world. The World of Charles and Ray Eames is now in Tokyo at the Meguro Museum of Art and has been seen at five other museums in Wakayama, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Ehime. Churchill and the Great Republic is the latest major exhibition under this theme.
Irene will demonstrate Churchill and the Great Republic. [Demonstration]
