LECTURE
National Gallery of Victoria

Denise Montgomery former Director of Communications and Marketing at the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego presented a lecture at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2010.

Montgomery is armed with significant experience as a communications and programming specialist in the arts. She is the co-author of From NASCAR to Cirque to Soleil: Lessons in Audience Development and has held various positions in the arts sector such as director for the Office of Cultural Affairs; director for the County of Denver and the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts and the director for Marketing for Western States Arts Federation.

At the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego, Denise Montgomery managed all aspects of the museum’s audience development, marketing, public relations and visitor services. Under her stewardship the Museum generated 37 percent increase in attendance.

Impressively, Montgomery’s strategies increased attendances by 126 percent among 18–25 year old audiences through award winning Feed the Greedy Organ advertising campaign. Denise also maintained the Museum’s unique approach to generating culturally diverse audiences and patrons.

The Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego was singled out by the National Endowment for the Arts as an exemplar of audience development among culturally diverse and youth audiences. It has also featured as a case study in multicultural audience development in the Adjust Your View: A Multicultural Arts Marketing Toolkit by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Since the early 1990s the Museum has made it its mission to embrace the bicultural, bilingual community in a region that includes San Diego and its neighbour Tijuana across the Mexican border.

San Diego, one of the fastest growing areas in the US is also a culturally diverse region less defined by the borderline between the US and Mexico than by shared economies, natural resources and populations between two large, and diverse cities. San Diego is home to significant African American, Asian and non Mexican Spanish speaking communities. All of them are a source of new audiences, new arts practices and of future patrons.

The Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego developed a long-term strategy of building multicultural and youth audiences that began over 20 years ago in the late 1980s.

Denise Montgomery holds a degree in Marketing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is an alumnus of the Stanford University National Arts Strategies Executive Nonprofit Leadership Arts Program and the Washington Semester in the Arts program at American University.


National Gallery of Victoria
International Education Theatre

180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne

Denise Montgomery is presented through the financial support of the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria, Victorian Multicultural Commission and the venue support of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). The program is part of the Multicultural Arts Professional Development Program (MAPD) by Kape Communications, the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and RMIT Business Executive.

 

   

DM18June

Denise Montgomery Embracing Diversity, click to download the PDF.

 






     
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