CI to Eye with Monica Holt Sara Villagio, Chief Marketing Officer of Carnegie Hall
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Mar 19, 2026 Sara Villagio, Chief Marketing Officer of Carnegie Hall, leads marketing, ticketing, and digital innovation at the historic institution. She discusses listening-first leadership, shifting from recorded to live music, balancing legacy brand with experimentation, the inspiration behind a major rebrand, and modernizing ticketing and digital infrastructure.
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Sorrowful Drawer Of Broken Dreams
- Sara Villagio discovered a literal "sorrowful drawer of broken dreams" in Carnegie Hall's art department filled with rejected design ideas.
- The drawer illustrated the design team's creativity and became a resource for inspiration and future use rather than discarded work.
Start By Listening To Seventy People
- Do spend your early months in a new leadership role listening broadly and meeting one-on-one across the organization.
- Sara met 70–80 people in her first six months, handwritten notes in three notebooks, and attended many concerts to learn context before making big changes.
Create Space By Watching Airtime
- Do cultivate experimentation by involving different voices and watching meeting airtime to prevent the same people dominating conversations.
- Sara intentionally asks varied participants to contribute and reminds teams to 'watch your airtime' to create space for new ideas.