About the Executive Director
Pauline Saliga joined SAH as executive director in 1995, just as the Society was preparing to move its national headquarters from Philadelphia to the Charnley-Persky House in Chicago. Saliga, who holds a master’s degree in art history and museum administration from the University of Michigan, was associate curator of architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago from 1981 to 1995.
While at the Art Institute, Saliga organized numerous exhibitions and catalogues focusing on 19th- and 20th-century architecture in America and Europe, including Fragments of Chicago’s Past; Building in a New Spain; Contemporary Spanish Architecture; and Design for the Continuous Present: The Architecture of Bruce Goff, 1904–1982. While at the Society of Architectural Historians from 1995 until the present, Saliga has overseen the creation of numerous online academic resources, including JSAH online, the multimedia edition of the Society’s flagship journal, SAHARA, a shared online digital image repository for teaching and research, and SAH Archipedia, a growing online encyclopedia of American architecture based on the print series, Buildings of the United States.
Saliga’s other publications include The Sky’s the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers and many museum catalogues that she oversaw when she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from 1977 to 1981. Currently, Saliga is researching the social and economic history of Chicago’s International Amphitheatre and a 19th-century photographer who specialized in portraits of prominent actors and Chicago society.