Lauren Stoyles

Nominee for an ACO NextGen Award

Lauren Stoyles has spent over ten years working in Ontario’s local museums. She has been out in the community sorting through messy archives, managing artifact collections, working as a museum guide, and even volunteering on community boards to help keep local museums running.

What makes Lauren stand out is how she takes old stories and connects people to them today. She focuses on local history that often gets overlooked, like regional women’s history and working-class stories. For example, she built digital exhibits tracking the history of women working in Ontario’s early print shops, and she even made a short documentary about the 1978 Fleck Strike in Centralia.

Right now, she is finishing up her master’s degree in public history at Carleton University. Her research looks at how women have historically been treated and represented within the museum sector itself, showing she cares about fixing the future of the heritage field just as much as preserving its past.

Her dedication is already getting noticed on a provincial level. She recently won a 2025 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for her youth leadership in the sector.

Lauren is doing the work to keep Ontario’s local stories alive. Giving her the ACO NextGen Award is a great way to recognize a young professional who is genuinely moving the heritage field forward.