Linda Donley-Reid

Donley-Reid was an ornithological research assistant at the Smithsonian Institution after college. She was a Peace Corps volunteer and museum curator in Kenya in the early 1970s, at the Kitale Museum and the Lamu Museum. She was the first curator at the Kitale Museum when it opened in 1973, under the supervision of Richard Leakey. She worked on Swahili ethnographic exhibitions at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology in 1984, at Cambridge University in 1984, and at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1999. As an archaeologist, Donley-Reid directed excavations in Kenya, including eighteenth-century traders' houses and slave dwellings on Lamu and Pate Islands. She reconstructed Toad Hall, a 1480s Suffolk wool trader's house, in Napa, California. She was a licensed pilot, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Donley-Reid was a professional therapist in San Francisco from 1992.