Elaine Heumann Gurian is a consultant/advisor to a number of museums and visitor centers that are beginning, building, or reinventing themselves. Her current clients include the Nassau County Government museum systems, Museum of London, UK; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; National Children’s Museum, Washington DC; and the Pew Foundation, Philadelphia, PA.
In the recent past she has worked as a senior consultant to the following institutions (a partial list); African American Museum, Detroit MI; World Bank, Washington DC; Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CN; Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA; CIRMA, the National Archives of Guatemala, Antigua, Guatemala; the Museum of World Cultures, Gothenburg, Sweden; Ministry of Culture, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, NZ; and the museum systems of the cities of Leeds, Glasgow, and Carlisle in the United Kingdom. Gurian was sent by the U.S. State Department to consult in Chile and Mauritius.
Ms. Gurian has served as the Acting Director of the Cranbrook Institute of Science during construction, redesign, and installation of its museum between the death of the former director and the appointment of a successor, 1997-1999.
From 1991 to 1994, she was the Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened to the public in April, 1993. Her responsibilities included creating and coordinating the systems that converted the institution from its conceptual phase to a fully operational government museum, overseeing finance and budget with an annual allocation in excess of $34 million, supervising ongoing construction and all administrative services including security, facilities management, contracting, personnel and administration, most of which had to be newly created in order to open to the public.
During 1990 and 1991, Ms. Gurian served as Deputy Director for Public Program Planning for the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. She concentrated on planning the move of the New York City display space to the United States Custom House and oversaw the architectural program planning for building a new collections storage facility and Mall museum in Washington DC. She was responsible for coordinating a series of 12 consultations with the Native community and was head of the Smithsonian team that negotiated a $24 million memorandum of understanding with the City and State of New York for joint financing of the Custom House renovations.
From 1987 to 1990, Gurian was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Museums at the Smithsonian, providing oversight for all 14 Smithsonian museums with a combined annual budget of approximately $120 million. Among her other activities, she was responsible for the creation and supervision of the African American museum development project and the Institution’s Experimental Gallery.
For sixteen years (1972 - 1987), Elaine Heumann Gurian was Director of the Exhibit Center and Associate Director of the Boston Children's Museum, known for its exhibition and program experimentation that fostered enhanced family learning and its service-oriented programs, such as a therapeutic teenage work project for court and school identified at-risk youth, and a comprehensive special needs visitation program.
From 1969 to 1972, Elaine Heumann Gurian was the Director of Education at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, where she was in charge of building community-controlled playgrounds during a period of considerable civil unrest. In addition she helped create RECYCLE, a program and shop that recirculates manufactured leftovers to schools and individuals (which continues at the Boston Children's Museum).
In 2004, The American Association of Museums awarded Elaine Heumann Gurian the American museum community’s highest award, “The Distinguished Service to Museums Award.” In 1993, she won the "Outstanding Learning Disabled Achiever Award" from the Lab School of Washington and "The Distinguished Service Alumni Award for the Class of 1958" from Brandeis University. In 1985, Gurian was presented with the "Museum Educator's Award for Excellence,” America’s most prestigious award for museum educators.
Ms. Gurian served as editor for the volume Institutional Trauma: the Effect of Major Change on Museum Staff, published by the American Association of Museums in 1995. She is currently on the editorial board of Curator magazine and under contract to Routledge Press for a volume of her collected writings scheduled for publication in spring, 2006.
Gurian was elected Treasurer, Vice President, and Councilor-At-Large for the American Association of Museums (AAM), board member of the American chapter of the International Council on Museums (AAM/ICOM), regional representative of the Museum Education Committee (AAM/EdComm) and Vice President of the International Museum Education Committee (ICOM/CECA), and was appointed a member of the AAM task force on education which created Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. She is the immediate past-president of the Museum Group, an association of independent museum consultants.
In her early career she served as the art teacher for kindergarten through 6th grade at the Solomon Schechter School in Newton, Massachusetts. Gurian holds a B.A. in art history from Brandeis University and a M.Ed. in elementary education and art education from State College at Boston.