Lara Templin

Lara Templin is Gallery Experience Manager at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. She began working in museums at Colonial Williamsburg in 1994 while pursuing a master’s degree in biology at the College of William and Mary. After completing that degree, she decided to follow museum education as a career, working as historic tour guide, storyteller, and historic trades’ interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg. Lara became a lead interpreter at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation in 1999. In the years since she has worked on every interpretive site at both of the Foundation’s museums, supervised more than half of them, and run innumerable special events. Recently she moved indoors to manage the galleries at both museums. She researches and writes programming materials for her museums and teaches a variety of training classes. She has presented workshops at professional conferences for organizations such as VAM and ALHFAM. She also has taught science, art and history classes for a variety of museums, schools and libraries in her area. She is married to a fellow museum educator, Jay Templin, and volunteers with her local library and history center in addition to pursuing artistic interests like watercolor painting and pottery.