Born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas, Erin Dragotto left Kansas to pursue her college career at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California where she completed a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and a Minor in Art in 1999. Slated to teach at the elementary level, after graduating Erin took a turn and decided to find work in book publishing as a publicist, which then shifted to working for a PR company promoting business-to-business and business-to-consumer products in Los Angeles. Still wanting to further her interest in museums, Erin migrated to Northern California where she worked for a children’s museum in Sausalito while still pursuing PR and marketing and it was there where she determined her love of the arts was forever going to be a part of her career path.

In 2003, Erin applied to The School of the Art Institute in Chicago where she completed a master’s in art education in 2006. Toward the end of her studies in Chicago, Erin landed a job at the Adler Planetarium in the Education Department and after a few years, she was hand-selected to Direct the Chicago Council on Science & Technology (C2ST), a non-profit dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of science and technology. It was during the start of her non-profit professional career in Chicago, where she met her husband Kevin, they married, and then started a family.

After eight years as Executive Director at C2ST, Erin determined it was time to return to her love of museums and was recruited in 2014 to be the new Director of Development for the National Mississippi Museum & Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa, a historical society and aquarium. In July of 2014 she and her family moved to Dubuque where she spent nearly eight years fundraising, completing multiple major exhibitions and historic preservation-projects, while also kicking off their third capital campaign. During her tenure, Erin and her development team raised nearly $20 million, established partnerships with regional-to-national arts and culture organizations, and set-in-motion strategies that will support the museum for years to come.

As current Executive Director for the Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L), Erin is now able to combine her professional and creative attributes to building an art museum from scratch. Her 20+ years of knowledge of arts and culture, museum education, large-to-small communities, a wide range of museum and non-profit expertise (science-to-art) along with years of fundraising and partnership development allows Erin to champion this well-grounded art museum dedicated to not only promoting the arts in our digital age, but also breaking the mold of a museum’s role in the 21st century.