Linda Donley-Reid

Linda Lucille Wiley^[2] was born in Evansville, Indiana, and graduated from Evansville Central High School in 1963.^[3] She is the daughter of Gordon Wiley and Marjorie Upchurch Wiley.^[4][5] She attended Indiana University, where she was a member of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority,^[6][7] and she earned a degree in zoology at the University of Kentucky. She completed doctoral studies at Kings College, Cambridge, with her dissertation titled "The Social Uses of Swahili Space and Objects" (1984).^[8] She changed fields, and earned a master's degree in clinical psychology at San Francisco State University in 1990.^[9]

Donley-Reid was an ornithological research assistant at the Smithsonian Institution after college.^[5] She was a Peace Corps volunteer and museum curator in Kenya in the early 1970s,^[10] at the Kitale Museum^[1] and the Lamu Museum.^[11] She was the first curator at the Kitale Museum when it opened in 1973, under the supervision of Richard Leakey.^[12] She worked on Swahili ethnographic exhibitions at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology in 1984, at Cambridge University in 1984, and at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1999.^[9]

As an archaeologist, Donley-Reid directed excavations in Kenya, including eighteenth-century traders' houses and slave dwellings on Lamu and Pate Islands. She reconstructed Toad Hall, a 1480s Suffolk wool trader's house, in Napa, California.^[13][14] She was a licensed pilot,^[12] and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.^[4]

Donley-Reid was a professional therapist in San Francisco from 1992.^[9]