I have spent thirty years working inside museums and building them from the outside. The work is the same either way — figuring out how a collection, a community, and a building become something people choose to be part of.
I came to museum planning through the museums themselves. Before starting Museum Planning LLC in 1999, I worked inside institutions — at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, Liberty Science Center, Discovery Science Center, and the Children's Museum of Manhattan. I also served as Chief Operating Officer at a museum fabrication studio, which meant I understood the making of exhibitions from the inside out, not just from the planning document.
That combination — staff experience, operational knowledge, fabrication reality — is what shapes how I plan. I have been on the other side of the table when a consultant delivers a master plan. I know what happens to that document when the meeting ends. The plans I produce are designed to be built, not filed.
Museum Planning LLC is a personal practice. That is a deliberate choice, not a limitation. Every engagement I take on, I work directly. There is no associate who handles the day-to-day while I attend the kickoff meeting. When a board asks who they are hiring, the answer is: me.
The practice specializes in the full arc of museum development — feasibility through opening day. That means community assessment, strategic planning, business planning and pro forma, master planning, exhibition design, capital campaign strategy, operational planning, and post-opening evaluation. More than forty museums over twenty-five years, across science centers, art museums, natural history museums, children's museums, history museums, and cultural centers — in the United States, Mexico, and internationally.
I also teach. I am a part-time industrial design professor, which keeps me connected to how the next generation of designers and planners is being trained — and where the field is heading.
Museums are one of the few public institutions that exist to serve everyone — not just people who can pay, not just people who already know things, not just people who look like the people who built them. That obligation is what makes the work worth doing and what makes sloppy planning genuinely costly. A museum built on a bad feasibility study or a mission that never connected to a real community is not just a failed project — it is a failed public trust.
I also believe that the world museums open into has changed, and that planners who ignore this are not being principled — they are being negligent. Audiences behave differently now. Programming drives visitation. The physical and digital layers of a museum are one planning problem. A museum that opens without a plan for how it will reach people is already behind.
None of this means every museum needs to become a technology incubator. It means the plan has to account for the environment the museum will actually operate in — not the environment that felt comfortable when the planning started.
Museum Planning LLC works as a strategic partner with experience on both sides of the table — as a museum employee and as an outside consultant. Having operated within museum governance, operations, and capital realities, I understand what actually gets projects built, funded, and opened.
The work is structured and phased. It begins with mission and stakeholder alignment, moves through market and financial validation, and concludes with clear implementation frameworks. Each phase builds confidence with boards, donors, and funders — because confidence is what moves capital.
We are ready to begin within two weeks of an executed agreement.
The definitive primer on museum practice — nonprofit governance, collections, operations, audiences, and the fundamentals of what makes a museum work. Used in museum studies programs worldwide. A second edition is forthcoming, re-situating these fundamentals in the operating environment of 2026.
museums101.com →
A comprehensive, practical guide to creating visitor-centered museum experiences — from first concept through opening day. Covers audience research, interpretive planning, spatial design, interactive technology, fabrication, and evaluation. The DME Process introduced in the book is used in every Museum Planning LLC engagement.
museum-experiences.com →Graduate training in the discipline that bridges objects, space, and human experience. The foundation for every exhibition design engagement Museum Planning LLC undertakes.
Active in the classroom alongside the consulting practice. Teaching keeps the methodology honest and keeps the practice connected to emerging ideas in design and museum practice.
Offices in New York and Mexico City with an active international practice spanning the United States, Mexico, and beyond. Active member of AAM, ASTC, and ACM.
An hour. No cost. No obligation. Tell me where you are and what you're trying to build.
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