Natalia Crujeiras, CEO, Museum of Miami

Invest: spoke with Natalia Crujeiras, CEO of the Museum of Miami, about the institution’s rebrand, its role in strengthening civic identity and belonging, and its vision for serving communities across Miami. “We’re becoming the Museum of Miami, a real civic platform where the city can come to understand itself,” Crujeiras said.

What is driving the museum’s rebrand, and what does it represent for the institution’s future?

We are the oldest cultural institution in Miami, and we have been collecting and sharing Miami stories for 86 years. We spent the last three years engaging with our community, listening to our constituents, having conversations in different neighborhoods across Miami and with stakeholders, and what we heard was that the name HistoryMiami Museum is trusted, but does not really reflect the full scope of what we do. History is one of the many tools we use. The old name made some people feel that what we offered was not for them.

We are the Museum of Miami, for Miami, and about Miami. Miami’s museum for history, culture, art, and community. The new name, the Museum of Miami, positions us as a civic platform where the city can come to understand itself.

It’s not only a rebrand. It’s a recalibration of how our museum can serve our community. We’re incorporating a community strategy called Museum Without Walls… a museum without boundaries, where we’re coming to the community, where people live, learn, and gather, to share the stories of Miami and co-create with the different neighborhoods and the different people that call Miami home.

How are you reimagining the museum’s role in fostering dialogue, connection, and civic identity across Miami’s communities?

Civic identity is not something that’s inherited, nor is it just given. It’s something that has to be built in any community. In a city like Miami, where more than half of our population is foreign-born, having so many newcomers makes this difficult. Miami is incredibly diverse, but not always as inclusive as we wish it could be.

The way that you encourage inclusivity is through sharing stories, in seeing content, programs, experiences, and exhibitions where you see stories like yours, where your children show up and see people that look like them, or recognize that the journeys of their families might be similar to others that might not look like them. Shared stories build bridges of understanding and inspire people to be curious about Miami and about what it means to be a Miamian and call it home.

The only way that you truly take care of something is by knowing and valuing it. Our story, our history, as a museum that tells the history, the arts, and the culture of Miami, helps us anchor that and invite you to build a better Miami for the future.

How do you approach storytelling in a way that reflects Miami’s evolving identity?

In everything that the museum does in our programs, in our exhibitions, in our activations, we always ask ourselves a simple but powerful question: What does it mean to belong in Miami? What does it mean to be a Miamian? That could be different for many different people, so it’s really inviting people to reflect on what their connection to the city is. We want people to have a deeper connection to this place and to each other and inspire pride and belonging through curiosity. Understanding that Miami is an incredible place, that all Miami stories are important and have value and meaning, that you are a Miamian in your process of becoming part of this community, and that, as a Miamian, you can impact your community.

We not only tell stories, but we also co-create them with the community. We believe that the strongest experiences and exhibitions are participatory, not authoritative, and happen over time as we engage with communities. 

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities in creating a common identity in a global city like Miami?

Our biggest asset is also the biggest risk. Our diversity, our unique perspectives, and our different origin stories of how we came to Miami make us such a diverse, vibrant, and exciting place. It also allows the city to be a fertile ground for newcomers. We are open to ideas, and to the visionaries, the changemakers, the people who reinvent themselves; they’re embraced here.

That’s also the challenge of having this continual flow of people who come with their own identities, with their own stories of origin and history of their home, often with no real connection to Miami. Democracy depends on people who know their history and actively participate in civic life to shape the future. But across the country, people are talking more openly about loneliness and disconnection. Trust in institutions, information, and even each other is fraying. In a county like ours, constantly evolving and deeply diverse, that challenge can feel even more pronounced. The good news is Americans trust museums. Nearly 9 out of 10 people in America find museums trustworthy, second only to family and friends (according to the American Alliance of Museums). So, we are uniquely positioned to be a place that brings people together, a space for dialogue, understanding, and connection.

Telling stories that connect us to one another allows us to create empathy and understanding, ultimately building a stronger, more connected, more resilient city.

What role can the museum play in lifelong learning and public education?

Museums are uniquely positioned to serve as a third space of education that can fill gaps and connect people to their community. We think about our educational offerings in multigenerational ways. One of our priorities is families with children. There’s consistent research that shows the importance of developing a connection to place during teenage years, and later as young people develop their identity, values, purpose, and agency.

The museum is particularly focused on engaging families with children to help make those connections to place so kids can grow proud of where they live. We have a close relationship with Miami-Dade County Public Schools. We bring content to the classroom; we bring the students to the museum and to historic sites, so it’s an ongoing process to plant that seed of curiosity, knowledge, and love of place.

What is your vision for the museum’s expanded facility?

We think that Miami deserves a city museum: a 21st-century museum of Miami, as vibrant, ambitious, and gorgeous as our city is. We want a future-ready facility, designed with inclusivity in mind, for accessibility purposes, that is resilient to climate change, that properly protects our collection, and that has spaces for people to come together.  We have more than 2 million photographs that tell the story of Miami, and countless other documents and artifacts, including 40,000 three-dimensional artifacts. We hold the largest living archive about Miami.

We want people to be able to come and have access to our unparalleled collection: researchers, scholars, students, curious people. But we also want to make sure people have the opportunity to engage with our content and the stories of Miami from their communities. So, we are intentionally dispersing ourselves to have a presence in Miami’s everyday life.

How is the museum using technology to deepen participation and access?

Technology is allowing access to collections to become more democratized. This summer, for example, we unveiled a new mural that was an interactive tool where people could share their perspectives and their hopes for the future. We were one of only eight venues in the entire country trusted by the National Archives to host the Founding Documents of our nation. In parallel to that, we invited people to reflect on our nation’s founding ideals through this interactive mural that allowed anyone at the museum or from home to participate. It’s an example of interactivity that allows a multiplicity of voices and perspectives to come together.

How can museums use historical context to help shape a more inclusive future?

Museums are one of the last trusted civic spaces. With increased distrust, particularly among youth, museums have a unique ability to facilitate the discussion of difficult conversations from different perspectives in a civic and safe space. Because of the rigor, the scholarship, and the care that we put into everything that we present — citing primary sources, working with historians and researchers to put things in context — we are building on decades of public trust. 

We can use our history, our memory, to generate understanding and clarity of how we got here, but also generate momentum and inspire people to think about the future they want to have.

Our history’s not perfect. There are moments of triumph, moments of difficulty, things that are unfinished, and we should be able to come together to unite over solutions that make Miami stronger and more resilient.