Rachel Freeman is an Assistant Paper Conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago. As the museum’s sole conservator dedicated to the treatment of Asian prints and paintings, she has been involved with the conservation of Japanese prints, East Asian scrolls and screens, ancient and modern Indian and Islamic paintings, and thangka. She is a veteran of several gallery renovations and is involved with climate monitoring and storage planning. Rachel came to the Art Institute as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in 2005. Previously she worked at the Balboa Art Conservation Center in San Diego, California where she was a third year intern and subsequently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow.

Rachel presented a talk on Jose Guadalupe Posada’s materials and techniques at the Newcastle Printed on Paper Conference in 2007. She authored a technical note on the same topic for the 2006 Art Institute of Chicago publication Jose Guadalupe Posada. She presented a poster on the identification of palm leaves used in Indian manuscripts at the 2005 AIC Annual Conference in Minneapolis, MN. The poster was later published in the 2005 Book and Paper Group Annual.

Rachel earned her MA and CAS degrees from the Art Conservation Graduate Training Program at Buffalo State. She currently serves on the Book and Paper Group Publications Committee as Wiki Coordinator for the Paper Conservation Catalog.