Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty currently serves as Deputy Commissioner for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs, overseeing visual arts initiatives for the city. Within this role she leads cultural policy and arts strategy for the public art, exhibitions and education programs across all City departments and agencies. She previously served as inaugural Director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, the world’s largest museum library system consisting of 21 library research centers and nearly three million library volumes and over 44,000 cubic feet of archival materials chronicling the history of the Smithsonian.  Her additional experience includes, serving as Associate University Librarian for Cornell University where her portfolio responsibilities include the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC), Kroch Library, Division of Asia Collections, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library and the division of Digitization and Conservation Services (DCS). Her previous positions include Director of Collections and Services at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at New York Public Library; Executive Director of The Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago; Adjunct Professor at the Dominican University Graduate School of Library and Information Science where she taught “Archives and Collective Memory” and “Archival Administration and Practices”; and the Herbert H. Lehman Curator of Political History at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She has served on various committees and roundtables in the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Rare Book and Manuscript Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association (ALA). In 2013 Tamar was the recipient of the SAA’s Distinguished Service Award for her role and contributions to the Univ. of Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium. She is a cohort member of the ARL Minnesota Leadership Institute. Tamar holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science with a Specialization in Rare Books, Archives and Preservation Management from Simmons University, Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science with a minor in Japanese from the University of Houston. Her research interests include medieval manuscripts, collective memory, and historical trauma, artists’ books, book arts, and paper-making. She is a proud birder, Nipponophile, and native Chicagoan.