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Jascin N. Leonardo Finger is the MMA’s Deputy Director and the Curator of the Mitchell House, Archives, and Special Collections. She has worked at the MMA since the late 1980s, becoming Curator in 1999. While at the MMA, she taught first through eighth grade social studies at the Nantucket New School and for four years, the MMA and Egan Maritime Foundation employed her jointly as curator. Ms. Leonardo Finger holds a degree in history and art history from Mount Holyoke College and a master’s degree in history with a focus on women and gender studies. Her master’s thesis titled “The Daring Daughter of Nantucket Island: How Island Women from the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries Lived a Life Contrary to Other American Women” was published in 2014 with the same title. Under her curatorship, the Mitchell House and MMA were awarded an Architectural Preservation Award from the Nantucket Preservation Trust in 2012. Ms. Leonardo Finger is the originator of the MMA’s Maria Mitchell Women of Science Symposium. She is an active member of the historic preservation community on Nantucket. She is a member of the Nantucket Historic Structures Advisory Board, the Vice President and trustee of the Historic Coffin School, and a member of the Nantucket Preservation Trust Awards Committee. She is a past member of the Nantucket Historic District Commission and Nantucket Historic Commission. 

Favorite Maria Mitchell Quote

Ms. Leonardo Finger has many favorite Maria Mitchell quotes but two of them are: 

“Standing under the canopy of the stars, you could scarcely do a petty deed or think a wicked thought.” 

“The step, however small, which is in advance of the world, shows the greatness of the person, whether that step be taken with brain, with heart, or with hands.”