When Monica Holt arrived in Des Moines last fall to interview for the top job at Des Moines Performing Arts (DMPA), she was entering unfamiliar territory. Raised outside Washington, D.C., Holt had spent 16 years at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one of the nation’s most iconic arts institutions. She’d never visited Iowa before.
But the moment she started meeting people in Iowa, she said something clicked.
“I was so enchanted by the way folks talked about each other and how they supported one another,” Holt said on IPR’s Talk of Iowa. “The richness of the arts community here really is not to be believed.”…