BLACKSBURG, Va., Nov. 15, 2005 – Gov. Mark Warner has appointed Anna Fariello, an adjunct professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, to serve on the board of trustees for the Frontier Culture Museum. Located in Staunton, the living history museum presents the cultural heritage of immigrant peoples who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish themselves in a new world.
Last year Fariello served an interim term to fill a vacancy brought on by the death of Edgar A. Toppin, professor emeritus at Virginia State University.
Fariello teaches courses in Material Culture and Museology, and also concentrates on community research projects. She completed a comprehensive inventory of cultural sites in southwest Virginia in collaboration with Floyd County and an exhibition and edited volume of writing in cooperation with the Christiansburg Institute. The latter exhibition A Century of Contribution toured throughout the Southeast was at Radford University this fall. A second exhibition on the historic craft revival, created in cooperation with the History Museum of Western Virginia and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife, is currently on view at Berea College Art Gallery in Kentucky.
Currently director of Curatorial InSight, a museum planning and exhibition development firm, Fariello came to Montgomery County to develop a campus museum and museum studies program for Radford University. She was RU’s first full-time gallery director and curator and presided over cataloging the collection, renovating the galleries, and establishing an on-campus sculpture program. After 10 years, Fariello left to become a Senior Research Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum where she commuted weekly to Washington DC for two years.
Former special events coordinator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and on the exhibition design staff of the Science Museum of Virginia, Fariello holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from James Madison University and a master’s degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is author of the interpretive text Objects & Meaning and Images of America: Christiansburg. She is visual arts editor for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Appalachia from the University of Tennessee Press and Blue Ridge Roadways, forthcoming from University of Virginia press. The aforementioned regional cultural inventory will be distributed via the South Atlantic Regional Humanities Center website.