About Krista
Leadership Development. Audience Engagement. Guest Experience.
Intentional
Krista Dahl Kusuma is President at Experience First Consulting, which she founded to divine and nurture the potential of leaders of all levels within museums and cultural organizations, creating purposeful transformation. She has helped hundreds of people multiply their talent, work smarter not harder, and lead more intentional and fulfilling lives. Her work is featured in numerous publications, including Come, Stay, Learn, Play: A Guide to Making the Museum Experience (by Andrea Gallagher Nalls), a new imprint of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM); and she has presented at numerous national conferences.
Krista pioneered the highly acclaimed and widely duplicated Visitor Experience Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston’s (ICA). She transformed a security-focused reactive staff into a guest-centered cross-trained team to optimize engagement and experience. Through her adaptive training program or “toolkit,” Visitor Experience Associates tailored the engagement to a visitor’s unique needs. The result was consistently high guest satisfaction ratings and increased staff engagement.
Inspiring
In Boston Krista founded and ran the successful Visitor Experience Program Network. (VEPN), a professional leadership group with 25+ museum and cultural organization members. Krista started this group in light of the critical lack of resources and recognition for the visitor experience profession, and as a place to share best practices and connect people often siloed within their organizations. After moving to California, she founded and led Bay Area VEX, a group modeled after VEPN, and which completed its first year with 40+ unique members.
Impactful
As Audience Engagement Chair of the Visitor Experience Group based in Philadelphia, Krista oversaw a national network of VEX Ambassadors and the VEX Diversity Equity & Inclusion Fellowship. In her first year as Chair she doubled the number of regional networks led by Ambassadors.
Krista holds M.A. degrees in Art History from Boston University and Education from Azusa Pacific University and is the author of Dear VX, a cheeky advice column for visitor experience professionals. She is also an enthusiastic Director of Activities for her two young children and is a MBC cancer thriver.
A detailed CV is available on request.
