For Women’s History Month, HRA is featuring some of our women employees who contribute to all aspects of the company!
Libby Provost has worked as a public historian specializing in historic preservation for 16 years, and has been with HRA since 2016. With HRA, Libby is an architectural historian and interpretive specialist. Libby serves as project manager/principal investigator on cultural resource management (CRM) studies under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. She specializes in creative mitigation and is experienced in exhibition curation, oral history collection, archival work, research, writing, and editing. With HRA, Libby works in all divisions—Cultural Resources Management Division, Interpretive Services Division, and the History Division. She has a background in Western history, environmental history, and landscape history.
One of Libby’s favorite projects at HRA was the El Milagro project, in which she served as an interpretive specialist and project manager completing creative mitigation related to the El Milagro Historic Campus in Twin Falls, Idaho. With HRA historian Morgen Young, she developed content for interpretive panels and a historic context, both presented in Spanish and English. The content explored the deep roots of agricultural laborers in Idaho, including Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and multiple generations of seasonal laborers from Latinx communities. Another was the Lee Vining project, where she was lucky to join in some awesome fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as part of HRA’s work on the Lee Vining Hydroelectric Project relicensing effort. Fieldwork was challenging but really rewarding, surveying hydro facilities at high elevation in beautiful country. She enjoyed the team effort in the field with architectural historian Lauren Waldroop and HRA archaeologist Jordan Pickrell. HRA safety coordinator Jen Gilpin had their backs, sending us out with air quality monitors to ensure safe working conditions when a forest fire started nearby.
In her free time, she likes to have conversations with her kids about inclusive history, do puzzles, and watch British crime dramas.