Christine Begley

Christine (Chris) has more than 25 years of experience working with museums and cultural organizations to describe their impact, analyze their programs, and craft institutional plans that drive growth and innovation, ensuring they remain relevant for audiences.

I love helping a wide range of museums and cultural organizations tell their stories and realize their full potential.”

About Chris

Chris provides strategic and operational planning, fundraising program analysis and planning, training and coaching, and fundraising communications expertise to arts and culture organizations around the world. Her collaboration enables clients to articulate and reach ambitious goals that support their mission.

Chris writes compelling case statements and gift propositions for numerous institutions to clearly describe their impact on the world and how philanthropy enables their mission. These materials become important tools for leaders and staff in communicating with donors.

Examples of her work include:

• Leading strategic planning for a major art museum, resulting in staff alignment and a clear, ambitious plan for the museum’s future.

• Guiding a leading cultural organization through fundraising planning, which exponentially accelerated philanthropy. Her work included developing policies; providing strategic guidance on eight-figure gift approaches; crafting impactful messaging for proposals, the website, and other communications; coaching staff; and helping to craft a major new initiative to transform the organization’s work.
• Creating innovative and bold corporate sponsorship opportunities and presentations for an international cultural organization, increasing corporate engagement over multiple years.

Prior to joining Huron, Chris served as a senior adviser at GG+A, which was acquired by Huron in 2024. Concurrently, she also held the role of senior adviser to the director at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, where she led a global strategy to increase the museum’s activity and impact. Chris also held the role of vice president of development at the American Academy in Rome and spent nearly 18 years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she provided strategic vision and leadership for the museum’s capital campaign and major gifts and foundation fundraising. While at the Met, Chris created the framework for such major museum initiatives as the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium and the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art.

Chris was a co-curator of the 1999 exhibition “Guilio Romano: Master Drawings” at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She was a research assistant for the 2003 Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman.” She recently wrote the updated guidelines on fundraising for the Association of Art Museum Curators Handbook.

Chris holds a Master of Arts in art history from Syracuse University and a Bachelor of Arts in art history from The University of Texas at Austin. She is an advisory board member of the Syracuse University Art Museum and a member of the International Council of Museums, the American Alliance of Museums, and ArtTable. She is also a member of the Garden Club of Teaneck and a volunteer at her local food pantry.