Tales From the Museum: The Academy of Natural Sciences

Museums might be closed, but their wonders are still waiting to be discovered!

Join Kylie Holloway and Zak Martellucci for an insider experience of the museums you miss the most. On each show, we’ll celebrate an incredible museum and the people who work to make it great. We’ll explore the strange, sublime, and secret stories behind the work on display and we’ll close out the show with an exclusive conversation with a guest expert about the collection and how the museum world is coping with this uncertain time.

This week, we’ll be checking out the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia with Jennifer Sontchi, Senior Director of Exhibits and Public Spaces! Jennifer was raised by two Anthropology professors in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She found her true calling as a student at the University of Michigan where she learned the pleasures of cleaning fossils and making molds, casts, and models for museum exhibits. She has gone on to work at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Delaware Museum of Natural History. She began working at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in 2008. Jennifer lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband, son, two dogs, and a cat. If she had a band it would be called Charismatic Megafauna.