Jerry Podany is an independent heritage preservation consultant, advising institutions worldwide on issues of collections conservation, authentication, seismic mitigation, disaster response, and resiliency. He joined the Antiquities Conservation Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1978 and served as the Department Head/Senior Conservator of Antiquities Conservation from 1985 until his retirement in 2016. Podany received his conservation education at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, in archaeological conservation and materials science, in 1982. From 1999 to 2003 he served as President of the American Institute for Conservation, and from 2006 to 2012 served as President of the International Institute for Conservation; he is an elected Fellow of both.
Podany received the Rutherford John Gettens Award (recognizing outstanding service to the profession) from the American Institute for Conservation, and the Engineering Research Institute’s Heritage Innovation Prize (recognizing outstanding contributions in the development of innovative solutions to preserve heritage).
He has lectured and published widely including his 2017 book When Galleries Shake: Earthquake Damage Mitigation for Museum Collections (https://shop.getty.edu/products/when-galleries-shake-earthquake-damage-mitigation-for-museum-collections-978-1606065228).
Jerry Podany’s field work includes serving as a site conservator at Terqa in Syria, at the Athenian Agora, and at the Roman Forum of Trajan, and as field conservator for the preservation of the Laetoli Hominid Trackway Project in Tanzania. He also performed an evaluation of damage to the Sphinx in Giza. He has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California and has regularly lectured at Columbia University, NYU, and UCLA. Podany developed a series of collaborative conferences on protecting museum collections from earthquake damage in Turkey, Greece, Japan, Italy and China, resulting in numerous publications including the 2008 book Advances in the Protection of Museum Collections from Earthquake Damage. As President of IIC he initiated a series of global roundtable discussions addressing the interaction between contemporary social concerns and the preservation of heritage, ranging from the contentious interface between development and preservation of “living” historic districts to the impact of global climate change on the preservation of cultural assets. A topic he continues to be involved in as a Working Group Member and Advisory Group Member to the NEH/FAIC project “Climate Resilience Resources for Cultural Heritage (https://www.culturalheritage.org/about-us/foundation/programs/climate-resilience-resources).