Michael Morris, ACOR-CAORC Post-Doctoral Fellow Fall 2018

Michael Morris is an ACOR-CAORC post-doctoral fellow in fall 2018, currently working to conserve two marble Aphrodite figures found at Petra’s North Ridge Excavations conducted under ACOR Board members S. Thomas Parker and Megan Perry. After an initial polychrome study by Mark Abbe, these extraordinary figures will be conserved and exhibited in the new Petra Museum.

Michael is an independent conservator of sculpture and architecture based in New York City. Some of the prominent projects he has worked on or participated in recent years are the conservation and restoration of Tullio Lombardo’s Adam, Della Robbia’s Prudence, Michelangelo’s Cupidon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the sculpture collection at Yale University Art Gallery, and Yale’s Center for British Art. He also was a conservator with George Knight Architects on Louis Kahn’s last building, and the Yale Center for British Art, a project which received a 2017 American Institute of Architects Award. Other museums Michael has worked with include the Brooklyn Museum, the Sackler Museum at Harvard, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection in Houston, among others. He occasionally gives lectures for the Institute of Fine Arts archaeological conservation program.

Currently he has projects with the Sardis Expedition, a joint Harvard-Cornell universities project in Sart, Turkey, working on the restoration of the Temple of Artemis, an Asiatic sarcophagus, and the conservation of sector MMS that covers a monumental mud brick city wall dating to the 6^th-5^th century A.D. He also has worked on the monuments in the Eastern Hills in an advisory role, and is now working on the central ravine and western hills for the American Excavations Samothrace (a joint NYU-Emory University project). Other ongoing projects are the restoration of mosaics in the museum in Setif, Algeria, which is under the auspices of U.S. Ambassadors Fund Grant.

After graduating from the University of Oregon with a BFA, Michael moved to New York City to work as a sculptor, having exhibitions in New York, Boston, Cambridge, and Istanbul, including the Istanbul Biennial 1993. He worked as an assistant to Dimitri Hadzi at Harvard and then taught sculpture at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University as visiting faculty. While at Harvard he received the Hoopes prize awarded for a student thesis and faculty contribution. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Turkey in Sculpture from 1989 to 1992. He taught periodically at Bradford College, the University of Oregon, and Bilkent University in Ankara, while working as an artist.