Melissa S. Cradic is Curator of the Badè Museum, affiliated fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and lecturer in the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research focuses on household archaeology and the materiality of funerary rituals in the ancient Mediterranean world. She has held fellowships at University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and has taught courses on archaeology and ancient civilizations at Boston University, Sonoma State, and SUNY Albany. Additionally, she has directed archaeological field schools and conducted excavations and surveys in Israel for over a decade, including at The Megiddo Expedition, where she fortuitously first met future Badè Museum colleagues Brooke Norton and Samuel Pfister.
As Curator of the Badè Museum, she draws on her experience in museum exhibitions, education, and collections management at the Smithsonian Institution, SFMOMA, and Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology to present engaging exhibitions about the collections from Tell en-Nasbeh and to increase accessibility to the collections online.
