Work
Maggie has experience working with cutting edge and renowned companies and entrepreneurs in creative and purpose-driven industries. See below for more information on the different sectors Maggie works across, for select project examples, and for a list of clients:
Sectors
Ugo Rondinone, Seven Magic Mountains
Arts & Culture
Maggie has steeped herself in arts & culture in many ways: as a student, a teacher, an advocate, an editor, a curator, and a writer, among others. She has also been honored to work with some of the greatest and most innovative cultural institutions on strategic planning and brand positioning initiatives to help them change course, reach new and different audiences, rethink their modus operandi, and reorganize their structures.
Yayoi Kusama, Gleaming Lights of the Souls
Louisiana Museum
Science & Nature
Maggie has embedded herself in organizations dedicated to science and nature to develop strategic plans to realize game-changing visions; organize retreats, summits, and interviews to help ideate and problem-solve; collaborate on research studies to better connect with surrounding communities; and develop communications strategies to best articulate the essential mission and impact of these organizations.
Leo Villareal, Buckyball
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Education & Recreation
Coming from years of academic training, Maggie has dedicated herself to working in many corners of education. She has developed strategic plans for higher-ed institutions to help them transform and tackle challenging conditions; created programs within graduate schools to train leaders of the future; helped build a non-profit that reinvented the way children play; and positioned a company that transforms urban parks into vibrant spaces for community programming.
Dustin Yellen, Study for Psychogeography 44
Health & Wellness
With a lifelong passion for science, the outdoors, and athletic pursuits, health & wellness has become an important focus of Maggie’s practice. She has helped health-focused start-ups and entrepreneurs mature their businesses; evaluate and manage operations; lead crisis management for heavy turnover or economic crisis; develop positioning and content strategies for greater impact and reach; and more rigorously track income and expenses.
Private Home, Palm Springs
Architecture & Design
Maggie has worked in the architecture & design world both in-house and as a consultant by building and evolving brand strategies; driving organizational planning for future sustainability; and crafting positioning strategies for greater impact. When the work is complete, there is stronger clarity around identity and consensus around direction, informing everything from early stage concepting to business development strategies to marketing and communications.
Historic Light Bulbs,
Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Thought Leadership
Maggie regularly presents, moderates panels, and guides work sessions at conferences, summits, festivals, and retreats on organizational visioning & transformation or on the future of culture, including at SXSW in Austin and the Northside Festival in Brooklyn. She also spearheaded an initiative that tracked the patterns of cultural consumption to better understand the role and meaning of culture in people’s lives, and how and why that changes.
Project Examples
Architecture & Design:
Rockwell Group
Brand & Positioning Strategy
Thought Leadership
Maggie worked in-house at the architecture & design firm Rockwell Group for five years, helping to create a unified voice for stronger brand and messaging consistency and for greater narrative cohesion with clients across hospitality, entertainment, air travel, education, and more. This required crossing many departments: collaborating with design teams to articulate narratives for projects; developing the website, newsletter, and social media presence; working with clients and writers on press outreach; or helping to develop Imagination Playground, a non-profit dedicated to reimagining the future of child play.
Science & Nature:
Natural History Museum,
Los Angeles County
Strategic Planning & Innovation Strategy,
Brand & Positioning Strategy
Facilitation
In this 2.5 year project, Maggie worked alongside the President, leadership, Board, and her team at LaPlaca Cohen —a strategic consultancy for cultural and creative clients—on an inclusive, insight-driven strategic planning, visioning, and brand positioning project for both the Natural History Museum and the LaBrea Tar Pits. The process was as important as the project, with iterative work sessions and interviews with staff, community leaders, and thought leaders that paved the way for cultural change, consensus building, and sweeping transformation and innovation. The result was a plan that cemented and accelerated steps to rethink the model and purpose of a natural history museum by embracing both natural history and living nature; focusing on both the natural and cultural worlds; and gearing up to reimagine the design and impact of the LaBrea Tar Pits in order to more powerfully tell the site-specific story of climate change and mass extinction in the context of the Pleistocene era in Southern California.
Education & Recreation:
California Institute of Arts
Strategic Planning & Innovation Strategy
Brand & Positioning Strategy
Facilitation
As one of the most important and radical institutes of higher education in music, film, dance, theater, and art, CalArts wanted to boldly face the national crisis in higher education in order to ensure their ability to educate and train artists for many more years to come. Founded as a community of artists, they tasked Maggie and her team at LaPlaca Cohen to create a strategic planning process that was as inclusive and community-driven as possible, which led to a 2-year visioning project centered on insights and feedback from students, alumnx, faculty, staff, Board, community members, and thought leaders. What emerged from the process was a wide-sweeping Opportunity Assessment summarizing all the opportunities and challenges facing the institute; a newly developed mission statement and set of values; and Strategic Framework that prioritized particular goals and laid out a plan to realize them over the next 5 years.
Health & Wellness:
Anne Peled, M.D.
Organizational Design & Management,
Brand & Positioning Strategy
This project was a remarkable opportunity to partner with a groundbreaking breast cancer surgeon and entrepreneur on her business and brand. With her unique training in conducting both the cancer and reconstructive surgery at once, and her pioneering innovation in preserving the nerves while doing do in order to maintain sensation in the breasts, Dr. Peled is distinctly positioned to forever change the treatment and standard of care for breast cancer patients. Maggie tackled both the business- and brand-side of Dr. Peled’s multi-faceted enterprise by evaluating and maturing her organization and operations; building and designing a new brand strategy and website; recruiting new team members and consultants; evaluating and introducing new business systems and processes; and leading crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thought Leadership:
Culture Track
As Managing Director of LaPlaca Cohen, Maggie scaled and transformed the Culture Track national research study into a cross-channel cultural platform that studies and forecasts the patterns of cultural consumption, and gathers thought leaders across industries to ideate around the future of culture in our world. The transformation of this initiative included developing a new brand, microsite, and content channels; in addition to presenting and moderating panels on the future of culture at national and international events, festivals, summits, and retreats.
Arts & Culture:
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Strategic Planning & Innovation Strategy
Brand & Positioning Strategy
Facilitation
Since its founding over twenty years ago, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has expanded from a small, single-artist museum to a much more diverse and complex organization, encompassing the galleries in Santa Fe, the artist’s home and studio in the New Mexico desert, groundbreaking discoveries and intellectual property from its own research center, and expanded program offerings both on- and off-site—all lending a unique perspective to O’Keeffe’s life and legacy. As such, the O’Keeffe engaged Maggie and her team at LaPlaca Cohen to embark upon a visioning project that would build on its progress over the first twenty years in order to dream and plan for the next twenty years of transformation. Through a series of iterative work sessions with leadership and Board, and extensive community research and benchmarking studies, we developed an Opportunity & Impact Assessment that both revealed the most powerful opportunities that the organization could pursue and prioritize, and articulated a new brand architecture and strategy that would better represent the broad impact of the organization beyond a typical museum.
Client / Project List
Architecture & Design
Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum
Leroy Street Studio
Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects
Rockwell Group
SHoP Architects
Ten Arquitectos
World Monuments Fund
Health, Nature, & Science
Anne Peled, M.D.
ArtScience Labs
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
La Brea Tar Pits
Natural History Museum
of Los Angeles CountyPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Education & Recreation
Brooklyn College
California Institute of Arts
City Parks Foundation
Imagination Playground
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
Visual Arts
Baltimore Museum of Art
Brooklyn Museum
DIA Art Foundation
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Guggenheim Museum
Museum of the City of New York
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Rubin Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Walters Art Museum
Performing Arts
Center Theatre Group
Metropolitan Opera
The Music Center, Los Angeles
Roundabout Theatre Company
Segerstrom Center for the Arts