"There was a place near my home where I used to go birding. It was part of the Great Swamp, just west of the National Wildlife Refuge near Basking Ridge, New Jersey. One day I went there, and they were bulldozing a field that was a particular favorite of mine. I marched over to a trailer parked there and demanded to know why there was construction going on in this beautiful wetlands area.

"Well, it turned out it wasn't bad after all. The property had been purchased by the Somerset County Park Commission, and they were building an environmental education center there. They were using the bulldozer to create some ponds to attract waterfowl and marsh birds. I was totally placated."

"While talking with the people who were planning the environmental center, the conversation turned to what I did. I had studied biology at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, but I also did illustration. I brought in a portfolio of my work and I was hired to do artwork and, later, when the center opened, exhibits." It was a lucky accident, since Joyce had been unsure of what she wanted to do when she finished college.

"After a while I got into programming along with the artwork. There were plans in the works for an exhibit hall, but I was impatient to get more involved in exhibit work full time." She sent her resume to a handful of natural history museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

While on a birding trip to Trinidad and Tobago led by Stephen C. Quinn, Senior Production Manager in the Exhibition Department of the American Museum of Natural History, she became very interested in the opportunities a job there would offer. "They had an internship program there at the time, but I just missed the boat because they had filled all of the positions for the year." She did not lose hope, however, and when she applied again the next year she was accepted.

That was 14 years ago. In the intervening years, Joyce has gone on collecting expeditions in the Florida Everglades, Costa Rica, and the Central African Republic. She has helped to build dioramas ranging from a gator hole for the Museum's Endangered! exhibit to an amber forest for the traveling exhibition Amber. She is a Senior Principal Preparator and a member of the team that assembled the vast rain forest diorama in the new Hall of Biodiversity. Aside from diorama building, she has made models for the Hall of South American Peoples and sculpted two of the reliefs in the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution.

Joyce is happy to be building dioramas at AMNH. "There's a long and marvelous history of diorama building here, and it's something we do really well. There was a time when it was thought that dioramas were old-fashioned, but I'm glad to say that during the time I have been here there has been a complete turnaround, a sort of renaissance of diorama building using both the historic techniques and new ones, and lots of new materials. People are now recognizing that in so many cases this is still the best way to portray natural habitats and animal behavior."

Back to Menu