Victoria (Tokarowski) Reisman ’07 started taking a museum studies course with Ricardo Viera when she was a junior and Viera was director of LUAG. “He encouraged me to go back to school and pursue museum studies,” she says.

Reisman majored in design arts while at Lehigh with a minor in art history and a concentration in museum studies. She went on to earn a master’s degree in museum studies from University of Sydney in Australia.

“Ricardo encouraged me to pursue my dreams and look at things differently,” she says. “He would say, ‘You can’t reinvent the wheel, but you can paint it a different color.’”

Reisman is now a curator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation’s Bureau of Historic Sites at Peebles Island Resource Center, where she works with historic sites and parks to create exhibitions across the state. She also assists independent researchers looking for historic information.

Reisman previously served as curator of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, where she produced 21 special exhibitions, developed a nationwide juried photography exhibition and created a grant-funded gallery to highlight trophies from the collection.

“Every day you get to discover something new or learn something new,” Reisman says of her career. “I’m still a very visual thinker, so even though I don’t work directly in the design profession anymore, I still use my design skills to lay out what a gallery should look like.”