Community in the Workplace Barriers Survey: Results and Analyses

Laura L. Lott is the administrator and chief operating officer of the National Gallery of Art, where she oversees nearly half of the museum’s staff. She was most recently president and chief executive officer, and previously COO and CFO, of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). While at AAM, Lott established the organization’s first department of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion; launched Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity and Inclusion; and led an expansive advocacy effort to secure unprecedented federal relief funding for museums during the pandemic. Prior to her time at AAM, she served as chief operating officer for National Geographic Society’s The JASON Project, director of programs and operations at the MarcoPolo Education Foundation and MCI Foundation, and senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Lott is a certified public accountant and holds a BS in business from American University in Washington, DC.

Micah Parzen is a nonprofit leader, attorney, and anthropologist, who is always searching for ways of partnering with others to create transformative organizational change. He has served as CEO of the Museum of Us (formerly the San Diego Museum of Man) since 2010, where he and his team are focused on developing better and better practices in what an anti-racist and decolonial museum can look like, along with how those practices can create a positive ripple effect in the museum field and beyond. In the past three years alone, the work of the Museum of Us has been featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Museum magazine, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, among other high-profile platforms. Micah currently serves as the President of the Board of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, a collaboration of 28 arts and culture institutions in Balboa Park, which sits on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Kumeyaay Nation.  Micah holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University, a J.D. from UC Davis, and a B.A. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley.

Anne W. Ackerson, representing AASLH, is a former history museum director, director of the Museum Association of New York, and director of the National Council of State Archivists. Her independent consulting focuses on governance and management issues in cultural institutions. She is the co-author with Joan Baldwin of Leadership Matters: Leading Museums in an Age of Discord, a book examining history museum leadership for the 21st century; and Women in the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace, which explores the professional lives of the sector’s female workforce today and examines the challenges they face working in what was, until recently, a male-dominated field. In 2018, she collaborated with Baldwin on research revealing that 62% of the museum workforce are affected by some form of gender discrimination. She currently serves on AASLH’s Gender Discrimination/Sexual Harassment Task Force and recently co-authored a Technical Leaflet and article on the topic for the association. She is a frequent workshop/webinar presenter on issues of museum ethics, executive leadership, financial management, and board roles and responsibilities. In addition to teaching the AASLH Online Course Leadership and Administration for History Organizations, she developed curriculum materials and a webinar on strategic planning for the American Association of State and Local History’s STEPS program, a national standards program for history museums.