Porter Mitchell
Gallery and Membership Manager
 B.A. Agnes Scott College
M.H.P. Georgia State University, Atlanta
I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, playing in the marsh and picking oysters with my dad. I relocated to Atlanta, Georgia to attend college, graduating with a BA in history. My undergraduate research focused on exploring throughlines of The Lost Cause through public memory landscapes through both intentional monument-building and the more incidental realities of the built environment.Â
 After graduating, I worked for nine years in the sustainable and community-based agriculture movement, operating community gardens and farmers markets, serving as a state-wide small-farms consultant, fundraising for farmer support, operating a disaster relief program, and in my spare time, researching and recreating traditional fiber and medicinal plant practices.Â
 Wanting a career change, I enrolled in the Master of Heritage Preservation program at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta in 2022, and completed my degree in December 2024. My academic work focused on architectural preservation, preservation of endangered cultural practices, folk medicine, and preservation of traditional Southeastern plant ways and ecological knowledge. I returned to my home in the Lowcountry for my capstone work, partnering with the Getty Institute and the Gullah-Geechee community on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina to develop digital surrogates for significant sites in order to share the island’s cultural heritage without the negative aspects of physical tourism. My project sought to share the complex, land and water-based history and present of the dwindling Daufuskie Gullah-Geechee community through interactive, digital recreations of sacred and secular spaces.Â
 I relocated to Troy, New York in January 2025, seeking a safer political climate for genderqueer people and a better quality of life. In Troy, I volunteered and worked at the Hart-Cluett Museum/Rensselaer County Historical Society, revamping their architectural history programming and assisting with fundraising, events, and managing the museum’s membership program.Â
 I am perennially interested in exploring interconnectedness, and how if we follow the threads of the present moment back, we can see how all of our experiences, our histories, and our cultures are tightly interwoven with each other and with the land and water itself.