My journey began in Hollywood, where I was the 8th person brought on to grow a small production company into a global film and television production house. I was fully immersed in the influence of mass media in all of its forms–popular culture to hard hitting documentaries, cable news to reality TV–on how/what/why we think and do what we do. It was terrifying, exhilarating, exhausting, and wildly fun. I learned that entertainment can also be educational, deeply moving and impactful, and have meaning beyond the almighty dollar.

After leaving California for a short stint, I returned as part of an acquisition team who saw the buyout of a music video production company. This is when “hostile takeover” became a well-worn phrase and my relationship building foundation was born; when I made a self-discovery of unknown reserves of empathy and compassion; when the first notions of community, place, and creative coalitions converged in a manner so meaningful as to continue to inform my perspective decades later.

This is where I dreamt that, when I grow up, I wanted to marry entertainment with mission, private with public, popular culture with education.

While Hollywood was where my love of popular culture and all forms of media was born, Washington, D.C. became the city where my love of museums and cultural centers manifest full-blown. Traveling two thousand miles from where I started, Smithsonian became my home for over 17 years and counting—home to discovering the full range of what a museum can be, what it should be, and what it mustn’t try being; home to realizing the difference between seeing ourselves through the lens of a museum and seeing a museum through the lens of our personal selves.

The world’s largest complex of museums provided the stage for my professional coming-out, during which I would hone my skills in launching start-ups and turning around failing businesses, centralizing vastly de-centralized units and operations, and managing multi-disciplinary/multi-lingual/multi-personality teams of people, all the while under the close scrutiny of a group of folks who work just steps away under a very large and unforgiving dome of expectation (hint: the Capitol.)

This is where “mission critical” became a staple in my vocabulary; where content and public programs held deep meaning to not only those of us creating them, but to those who searched to see themselves represented; where I discovered my persuasive abilities (and tenacity) to convince the institution that “for profit” didn’t always mean “for sale,” that it didn’t connote selling your soul for the bottom line, but that private/public partnerships could be beneficial for all parties, including the public. This is where I launched a division that would help bring financial stability to the Smithsonian so that it could educate and enthrall the public for another 170 years and more.

This is where I grew up.

Who knew that just one floor up, an incredible experiment was about to begin when I moved from the 6th floor to the 7th floor of Smithsonian’s building to run a small, somewhat fledgling unit operating as a cultural center? With a skeletal crew of a half dozen or so dedicated team members, I was thrust into leading the group after the departure of the director, a dear friend who left to get back home, but not before helping to set up a structure that we could build out as our own.

In less than a year, money was raised, operational structures and systems developed, new team members hired, and communities formed—and a transformed center was born, one with diversity and inclusion rooted as deeply in our DNA as blood is to body; where collaboration and partnership with those whom we serve became second-nature; where team members were stretched to their limits but succeeded out of sheer will and personal investment in one another; and where we turned “nomad museum” from an indictment leveled on us to a source of pride.

This is where relaunching a nearly 20-year old center as a startup married with its turnaround. This is where the great experiment of turning a museum on its head with a new concept of public programming called “Culture Labs” took shape and overturned once-held suspicions by colleagues that it would fail and bring shame to the parent organization. This is where the pop-up experiences of our Culture Labs—rapidly prototyped, created in various locations, in close collaboration with and celebration of those local communities—would go on to inform and shape the parent Smithsonian’s future thinking of how it can create and sustain affinity with the people it serves.

This is where I led a cultural center to the front of the line, to finally take its seat at the table and sit proudly with its towering siblings, to thrive as a nomadic museum with no walls and no barriers and speak for its communities, to link connections across cultural identity and shared history, all toward making it all relevant and applicable to diverse communities who look upon it as a reflection of the nation’s identity.

This is where I live.