Senior Project Manager, Exhibitions

How You’ll Contribute

The National Geographic Society headquarters, based in Washington, D.C., is undergoing a significant renovation project on its campus (called Museum of Exploration), which will be completed in 2026. Components of the new Museum will include a state-of-the-art pavilion entrance, auditorium, iconic photo gallery, exhibition space, immersive walk-through attraction, retail, food and beverage, education center, archives, tours, and exciting new event space. The capstone of the renovation is a one-of-a-kind nighttime experience in the courtyard.
In addition to this new on-campus experience, National Geographic Society has an existing business of touring exhibitions and immersive experiences that will be growing and expanding. The Exhibitions department is responsible for developing and bringing to life the exhibits and experiences at the Museum, as well as creating, developing, marketing, and selling our traveling exhibitions products.

The National Geographic Society Exhibitions team is composed of content developers, designers, producers, and project managers. This division is responsible for creating content for the Museum and running the traveling exhibitions program.

Reporting to the Director of Project Management (Exhibitions), the Senior Project Manager will lead major project areas, vendor relationships and manage our internal creative teams’ workflows and may manage up to three direct reports. This role will maintain timeline, budget, schedule and communications for internal Exhibitions team involvement in major projects with heavy immediate focus on the Museum project.

Your Impact

Your Impact

Responsibilities Include:

• Project Management (50%)

  • Manages concurrent projects with interdependent work streams utilizing a variety of project management tools and methodologies.

  • Coordinates submittal feedback to ensure clear direction.

  • Ensures projects are completed on time and within budget by developing and maintaining clear and detailed project schedules and budgets that have up-to-date estimates, costs, milestones and timelines. 

  • Acts as a key interface with internal team members, stakeholders and leadership. 

  • Creates internal work schedules and monitors interim deliverables. Attends and records internal scheduling meetings, track and report, open projects from start to completion.
     

• Communication (30%)

  • Represents the standards of NGS and supports the collaboration between the Creative and Operations teams' work on the Museum of Exploration project. 

  • Work with the Director of Project Management and leaders to identify opportunities to improve organizational efficiencies, facilitation, and project management as well as workflow and solutions in support of increasing successful collaboration and communication. 

  • Serve as liaison between vendors and creative staff to ensure clarity,  transparency, quality and project progression.

• Production Coordination (20%)

  • Manage pre and post production project elements with the Exhibitions Team. Activities may include logistics, travel media management, releases and permits, organization of media assets and contracts and other legal documentation. 

  • Manage vendors supporting creative work and  producing built environments from proposal through final project delivery through contracting, management, timeline, and budget responsibility.

What You’ll Bring

Necessary Knowledge and Skills

• Demonstrates competencies such as sound business judgment, facilitation, decision making, problem solving, and team building.

• Highly organized, self-starter, with superb communication and interpersonal skills.

• Experience coordinating complex teams and project schedules.

• Effective prioritization, deadline driven, attention to detail

• Capacity to work independently and in teams as required

• Resourceful and driven to find creative solutions

• Should be curious and eager to learn

• Solid understanding of the processes and workflows of media production, interactive production, exhibition installation.

• Strong attention to detail and ability to appropriately prioritize tasks

• Proficient in Microsoft and Google Office suites