Podcast: The Long Game of Arts Leadership
A conversation with Tampa Arts Alliance executive director Michele Smith about arts leadership, infrastructure, and the slow work of building a creative ecosystem that lasts.
How Tampa Arts Alliance executive director Michele Smith built an arts ecosystem through patience, persistence, and a refusal to chase the spotlight.
If you’re looking for a neat origin story, this isn’t it.
There’s no lightning bolt moment where Tampa suddenly “became” an arts city. No single fundraiser, no viral campaign, no ribbon-cutting photo that explains how we got here. What is there—quietly, steadily—is labor. Years of it.
That’s the story Michele Smith tells on this episode of The Arts Passport Podcast: not a victory lap, but a map of how cultural ecosystems actually get built.
Smith, the executive director of the Tampa Arts Alliance, didn’t inherit an institution. She carved one out of conversations—more than 140 of them in her first year alone. Artists. Administrators. Civic leaders. Developers. People who had been doing the work for decades, often without recognition, often in silos.
“I had to get to know the landscape,” she explains. “You can’t top-down something like this.”
That instinct—to listen first—runs through everything Smith has done. And it explains why the Alliance exists less as a spotlight and more as connective tissue: a bridge between artists, municipalities, tourism leaders, and the business community.
Listen to the episode
From Silk Trade to Cultural Infrastructure
Smith’s path to arts leadership was anything but linear.
She worked in international business. Imported silk through the Port of Tampa. Managed logistics during the BP oil spill. Taught yoga. Built artist databases before “platform” was a buzzword. Left the arts more than once when momentum stalled—and came back again when it mattered most.
A personal turning point came during the height of her oil-and-gas career, when her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The experience recalibrated everything: time, purpose, urgency.
“I realized I hadn’t allowed myself to fully go for what mattered,” she says.
That realization eventually led her back to Tampa’s arts community—this time with the business fluency, systems thinking, and resilience to build something sustainable.
Why Tampa Took So Long
One of the most striking questions in the conversation is also the simplest: how did a city this large go so long without a unifying arts alliance?
Smith doesn’t frame it as failure. She frames it as growth.
Tampa’s arts scene has long been rich but fragmented—strong theater collectives, music scenes, visual arts hubs, festivals seeded by county grants. What was missing wasn’t talent. It was coordination.
The Tampa Arts Alliance emerged not to replace that work, but to connect it—linking grassroots creativity with civic infrastructure and regional visibility.
And importantly, to stop Tampa from trying to be something it isn’t.
“We’re not the next New Orleans. We’re not the next Austin,” Smith says. “We’re Tampa.”
A Physical Home, Finally
In 2025, the Alliance crossed a milestone 26 years in the making: securing its first permanent physical space in downtown Tampa.
The moment matters not because of square footage, but because of what it signals. Presence. Permanence. A door you can walk someone through and say: we’re here.
Smith talks about elected officials seeing the space for the first time. About proximity to City Hall, the county commission, and longtime partners like Visit Tampa Bay. About what changes when arts advocacy isn’t abstract.
For years, the Alliance focused outward—promoting others, lifting up the ecosystem. Now, it finally has a place to gather, convene, and imagine what the next 25 years could look like.
Joy as Strategy
When asked about her hope for the future of the arts in Tampa Bay, Smith doesn’t hesitate.
“Joy.”
In a time defined by burnout, polarization, and algorithmic noise, joy becomes a radical choice. A reason to gather. A reason to stay. A reason to build something slower—and sturdier—than hype.
This episode isn’t about a single leader or a single organization. It’s about the unseen work that makes creative life possible.
And why the long game, it turns out, is the only one that lasts.
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Avery Anderson