What do you do for a living?
I design museum exhibitions that get strangers working together, talking to each other, and contributing their own creativity and knowledge to institutions.
What would you be doing if you weren’t doing that?
Building tree houses.
What do you do in your free time?
Rock climb, run around outside, construct frivolous home art projects.
What brought you to Santa Cruz?
The opportunity to play and work in the trees and ocean between professional trips to foreign cities.
What’s your favorite street?
My own—Mystery Spot Road. Everyone has a story to tell when they hear my address.
Name something you’re excited about.
Making civic and cultural institutions more useful social places for regular people. They aren’t there to sell ads or products, so they have great potential to serve community interests directly.
Name a pet peeve.
People who yell evaluative comments out of car windows.
What are you reading?
The New Yorker food issue. My favorite one of the year.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in the last three years?
You can get more interesting work pursuing a very specific niche goal than trying to cast yourself as a generalist.
Recent personal food trend?
I was just working in New Zealand and was introduced to hokey pokey. It’s a kind of honeycomb candy. I’m now totally obsessed.
