Our Team

Joseph Donald Cyr is the founder and director of the Musée culturel du Mont-Carmel and its parent organization, L’Association culturelle et historique du Mont-Carmel. Cyr is an avid cultural historian of Acadian and Québecois heritage, a lecturer of history and art at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and recently retired from teaching history and art at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM) in Limestone.

Cyr is an acting Advisory Trustee and Board Member of Maine Preservation and of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. Cyr is also an active member of the Traditional Arts Committee for the Maine Arts Commission, the Expansion Arts Committee for the Maine Community Foundation, the advisory group for Project Cultivate, and the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Advisory Council. He has served on the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Humanities Council, was the coordinator of the National Park Services’s Maine Acadian Culture Project, and was a consultant for the Saint John Valley Creative Economy Project.

Cyr earned his Bachelor of Science in History at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in 1969 and went on to receive his Master of Education (M.Ed.) with a concentration in History at the University of Maine at Orono in 1971. In 1974, he further obtained a Bachelor of Arts with concentrations in Art and English from the University of Maine at Presque Isle. Cyr soon returned to Orono and completed all seminar and coursework for a PhD in U.S. History with a concentration in Material Culture, Folklore, and Art History, though he did not seek the degree.

Terry Helms serves as the institution’s head preservationist, having presided over all aspects of the restoration process of the former Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel since 1989. A contractor by trade with expertise in technical art history, Helms has lead intiatives covering all aspects of the site’s refurbishment, from the structural to the decorative. In 2006 and 2014, Maine Preservation presented Helms with an Honorary Award for Outstanding Service in recognition of his lasting contributions to the preservation and restoration of the former Notre-Dame.

From 2010 to 2014, Helms served on the Maine Regional Coordinating Committee, structuring and facilitating the Congrès Mondial Acadien (World Acadian Congress) of 2014. A transregional development across Northern Maine, New Brunswick, and Québec, this global summit welcomed Acadians and enthusiasts of Francophone culture and history the world-over for celebrations, family reunions, symposiums, and concerts. Other notable projects Helms has facilitated include the restoration of an 1836 one-room schoolhouse for the Madawaska Historical Society, and the restoration of a late-nineteenth century chapel in Bowie, Maryland.

Helms attended the University of Maine at Presque in 1987 and holds various certificates in general construction and project management. Helms provides consultation and professional services in heritage management across Northern Maine townships through his private firm, TH Enterprises.

Mason McBreairty joined us in 2025 as the Musée’s Associate Director of Curation and Advancement. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Southern Maine, and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he specialized in the visual and material cultures and histories of France of the seventeenth- through early-nineteenth centuries.

His research explores how French prints and drawings, luxury wares and domestic décor (such as porcelain and fabric-inset boiserie), and ornamental ensembles (such as furnished interiors and gardens) were shaped by forces of circulation, transmission, appropriation, and extraction amidst the cross-currents of armed trade, imperial expansion, and colonial hegemony particularly between France and North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. Of special interest are the escapist reveries of the pastoral genre, the interplays between art and nature with elite cultures of taste, and the evolving landscapes of early-modern caregiving and maternal-child relations.

McBreairty has held positions within museums and galleries, particularly at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery where he co-curated or contributed to various exhibitions. At the Ogunquit Museum, he was involved in Anthony Cudahy: Spinneret, Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting, as well as Lee Krasner: Geometries of Expression, the first exhibition in Maine by the mid-century artist Lee Krasner (1908-1984).

He recently refashioned the Musée’s lasting exhibition, La vie encore: An Exhibit of Saint John Valley Artefacts, and will be overseeing, studying and advancing the Musée’s permanent collection. In tandem with his service at the Musée, McBreairty serves on the Council of Readers (CoR) of the College Art Association, a national organization in the U.S. for professionals in the visual arts.