Research Overview

“We have taken a very high-end technology and brought that into a space where anyone, anywhere can build a system and learn how to use it.” — Juilee Decker, RIT Research Minute, 2026

My research explores how people create, interpret, preserve, and share knowledge through cultural heritage. Trained as an art historian and museum studies scholar, I investigate the ways cultural institutions, technologies, and communities shape our understanding of the past and influence how knowledge is made accessible in the present. Over the course of my career, my work has evolved from the study of museums, public memory, monuments, and public art to interdisciplinary projects that combine humanities inquiry, heritage science, and digital technologies to reveal new information about cultural heritage collections.

Exhibitions and public-facing projects have long served as a critical component of my research practice. Since 2006, I have overseen or directed more than 200 exhibitions ranging from visual arts and material culture to public history and community-engaged projects, using exhibition-making as a form of scholarship, interpretation, and dialogue. Through collaborative exhibitions such as Crafting Democracy and Co-Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism, I have explored how museums and cultural spaces can foster conversation, critique, civic participation, and community engagement, while creating opportunities for diverse voices to contribute to public discourse. These projects reflect my belief that exhibitions are more than presentations of objects; they are platforms for shared inquiry, collective meaning-making, and public participation that connect scholarship to contemporary social questions. For more on these efforts, click here, here, and here.

Today, much of my research focuses on cultural heritage imaging and the development of accessible tools that support discovery, preservation, and stewardship. I am particularly interested in how imaging technologies can advance humanistic research questions by making previously obscured information visible, supporting new forms of scholarly inquiry, and broadening access to collections held by libraries, archives, museums, and community organizations.

Across all of my projects, I remain committed to a central principle: that research is most meaningful when it creates connections—between people and collections, technology and scholarship, students and professions, institutions and communities.