Biography

Renée is Lisjan Ohlone from Huchiun, Oakland, the ancestral homeland of the Ohlone people in the San Francisco East Bay. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2022 with a B.A. in History of Art, focusing on Portraiture & Identity. In 2023, she participated in the UCLA/Mellon Opportunity for Diversity in Conservation workshop, which introduced her to the conservation field and led to an internship the following summer, 2024, in Objects Conservation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

Her time at NMAI solidified her desire to pursue community-based conservation and to collaborate with culture bearers in caring for museum and Tribal collections. She also learned that cultural knowledge, relationships, and community priorities are essential components of responsible stewardship. After returning home, she volunteered in harvests and cultural & prescribed burns throughout California, working alongside Tribal communities to support the stewardship of land, cultural resources, and traditional ecological practices. Her involvement in cultural burning and harvest has further shaped the way she approaches conservation, expanding her understanding of preservation beyond museum walls to include living cultural landscapes, materials, practices, and relationships.

In 2025, Renée took a year-long Objects Conservation internship at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), working mainly from the de Young, where she continued developing her conservation skills before beginning graduate study.

Alongside conservation, Renée maintains an active art practice centered on Indigenous identity, history, and relationships to place. Her painting was recently exhibited in the 2025 Good Fire: Tending Native Land exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) and was acquired by the museum for its collection. In the coming years, her artwork will continue to be exhibited at museums across the United States and through a collaborative project with the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Renée hopes her work as both a conservator and artist is grounded in a commitment to Indigenous cultural heritage, community collaboration, and the continued care of cultural belongings, lands, and knowledge.