While Harvard’s alumni list boasts the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Natalie Portman, many of my classmates pursued well-trod paths promising financial security and certain prestige. As an Art, Film, and Visual Studies concentrator, I sometimes felt anxious about not following suit. Career paths in arts and culture are harder to define, often requiring creativity, taking chances, and betting on yourself.
As a senior with internships at a chamber orchestra and a London gallery under my belt, I still had no clear direction for life post-graduation. I met with the MCS arts adviser who asked me to think about what I would call myself in a job application. “Artist” felt wrong. I had neither the drive nor the talent. I had worked in production, but “Producer” didn’t ring true for me either. I loved my big picture, story-driven English and Visual History classes—particularly James Wood’s “The Essay: History and Practice” and John Stilgoe’s “North American Seacoasts and Landscapes—and found myself deeply interested in the narratives behind my AFVS projects. Taking stock of my experiences, I realized that my work could be summed up quite neatly. I was a storyteller.
This revelation came to life during a “winternship” at the Cambridge Community Foundation, during which I interviewed 15 cultural visionaries living in Cambridge. Telling their stories made me realize that “storyteller” was a real-life professional job. The more I thought about it, the more I realized my other work fit under that title, too. As a curator with the Harvard Undergraduate Student Art Collective, I was really curating stories rather than pieces. Dan Byers, Director of the Carpenter Center, taught me how to apply the same kind of big picture thinking I loved in my other classes to exhibition-making in his curation course my Spring semester.
With graduation looming, and through more visits with MCS, I learned about, applied for and was fortunate enough to be hired as the Postgraduate Curatorial Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. I would spend the next two years telling the stories of the most magical garden in the world, through a range of mediums: an essay series, a podcast with contemporary artists who exhibited there, an exhibition of newly commissioned landscape photographs, and two art book publications.
From Dumbarton Oaks, I was hired as an assistant to the Design Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. At NMAAHC, I worked on a digital collecting initiative titled Rendering Visible, telling the stories of Black designers and architects whose work represents less than 2% of the licensed field. Following the digital thread, after my Smithsonian appointment ended, I went to work as a Digital Associate for a DC-based public affairs firm called S-3 Group. I managed creative storytelling campaigns with precise measurable impact, including planning the communications strategy for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
The road less taken can be fruitful. I couldn’t predict the next step in my career path (albeit short) at any point. I trusted in what I knew about myself—that storytelling would be my guiding light. It is my throughline, and I have my winternship to thank for that. And now I’m back at the Cambridge Community Foundation as their Digital Communications Officer. I get to tell the brilliant, eccentric, inspiring stories of our city for a living. Best of all, I am excited to go to work, which is not something everyone can say.
When it seems unclear, lean into what you know. Seize opportunities with both hands. Don’t be anxious about what anyone else is doing. Follow your instincts. The rest will follow.
— Gabe Ziaukas
