About Me | Nicolina Gallo

Results-driven academic professional, educator, and digital curation specialist with 10+ years of experience in cross-institutional project management and designing impact-driven initiatives. Adept at program design, curriculum development, and instructional delivery, with proven expertise in copyediting, digital publishing, and creating accessible, equity-focused educational materials. I specialize in coordinating large-scale metadata migration and digital preservation initiatives, aligning institutional practices with DACS, MARC, OAIS, and CoreTrustSeal, as well as metadata normalization, crosswalks, batch transformations (OpenRefine, XSLT), and repository management across ArchivesSpace, Alma, Merritt, TMS, Axiell DAMS, and Azure— ensuring data integrity, reliable discovery, and long-term access. I have managed large-scale projects across leading universities, museums, and archives in the US and abroad. with experience in ensuring secure, seamless delivery of sensitive data through compliance-driven workflows. I maintain a strong capacity for triaging collections and coordinating project timelines. I'm accomplished with AI-language models, research methodologies, and thematic analyses, with a developed ability to identify logistical inconsistencies and cultural knowledge gaps. I'm skilled at aligning curatorial and IT teams with actionable recommendations to improve repository trustworthiness and leveraging collaborative curriculum expertise to adapt academic materials to organizational needs. 2024 recipient of Johns Hopkins M.A. with post-graduate Certification and 2022 UC Berkeley Honors BA. I speak Arabic (الفصحى فقط) and French, a little Italian, and Spanish., with 7 years volunteer experience in 9 nations on 4 continents and remain devoted to ambitious resource advancement to cultivate socially insightful, international, academic excellence.

For many years, I specialized in the changing gender roles of female North African and Middle Eastern street artists. I worked in collaboration with The Palestinian Museum assisting them with a $480K international grant disbursement, developing proposed requisition for auxiliary financing, regulatory funding and critical preservation techniques that highlighted the ethical implications of material deterioration. Prior to the University of London, Qatar's closure, I worked with them on an analysis of Qatari Heritage archival appropriation, addressing historical omissions in digital ethnological stewardship. I also completed a comprehensive evaluation of the UC Digital Library's preservation framework including a digital resource and data provider assessment, alongside a correlated, codified analysis of their aggregator services. I coordinated an institutional memory metadata migration initiative with The Royal Ontario Museum, implementing crosswalks, SHA-256 fixity verification, and a scalable QA framework to improve discoverability and user access. I designed a multilingual, QR-integrated digital visitor interface for San Francisco's Museum of the Eye to enhance audience accessibility, using UX research, augmented reality and multimedia networks to measure engagement. I've curated multiple on-site and online exhibitions, in addition to proposing an immersive, customizable VR experience using the Varjo VR-1 system to transform the artistry and narrative of Alice in Wonderland, Arabian Nights, and Where the Wild Things Are, into a visually dynamic, exploration. I'm based in Berkeley and San Francisco, because regardless of the gentrification, the housing crisis, and all the problems the Bay Area has, it's still home.