Petra Anastassiou

Where she came from

Petra was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and educated in the United States from the age of nine. She holds a B.A. in art history from the University of Pittsburgh (2010), an M.S. in conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (2014), and an M.Eng. in mechanical engineering from RIT (2018) which she completed during her tenure at IPI. Her undergraduate thesis was on Byzantine icon conservation. Her engineering thesis was on dehumidification load curves for archival cool-storage. She is the only person on the team holding both an art-history degree and an engineering degree, and we ask her about it more than she would prefer.

Five years at IPI

From 2014 to 2019 Petra worked at the Image Permanence Institute, the cultural-heritage research lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology — the lab that built the Dew Point Calculator in 2008 and the eClimateNotebook environmental-management subscription that hundreds of small institutions still use to manage their preservation environments. Petra ran the eClimateNotebook trainer program; over five years she trained approximately 480 conservators and facility managers across the United States, Canada, and Europe in how to read a long ribbon, how to compute a dew-point, and how to translate environmental data into a preservation-quality argument that a board of trustees will read. The training program is still running. We are still hiring graduates of it.

At Plenum & Reed

Sloane recruited Petra in 2018 over the course of three site walks at three different institutions where Petra had been retained as a third-party conservator and Sloane had been retained as the engineer. By the second walk they had developed a shorthand. By the third they had a job offer on the table. Petra moved to Pittsburgh in early 2019 and joined the practice as Commissioning Lead.

What commissioning means here

In a typical mechanical contract, “commissioning” means a one- or two-day startup procedure where the equipment is run through its paces, the controls are verified, and a punch list is generated. We use the word in a different sense, more borrowed from museum conservation than from mechanical engineering. For us, commissioning is the entire process by which a designed system becomes a tuned system. It typically takes between four and fourteen months. It begins with the first equilibration ramp and ends when the long-term ribbon shows that the room has held setpoint, within band, through one full annual cycle.

Petra is the lead on every commissioning the practice runs. She owns the equilibration plan. She writes the operating-procedure document. She reads the ribbons. She co-authors the binder. She trains the institution’s in-house staff in how to read the eClimateNotebook outputs — usually in two two-hour sessions, with a follow-up at the six-month mark. If you have ever sat through one of her trainings, you will recognize the practice she has built.

Today

Petra is the principal who first speaks with new clients on the phone. She runs the Friday-afternoon binder review, where every active commissioning is read into the room and the long-term ribbons are projected. She co-authors the journal entries on this site — including “Dew point as a protocol”, which she insisted we publish. She is also the practice’s liaison to the AIC Sustainable Conservation Environments working group.

She lives in Bloomfield, walks to work most days, and is on the board of two regional conservation nonprofits. The cat is named Stilton. He is on the manifest of every team photo in which he can be detected.

Talk to Petra

If you would like to talk to a person about whether your collection needs a Class AA, an As, an Ad, a B, a C, or a D regime, write Petra directly: petra@plenumandreed.example. The first call is usually 30 minutes and free of charge.