Dr. Neal V Hitch is a historian, preservation architect, and a museum specialist who has been working over 25 years developing historic sites and museums. Dr. Hitch has a specialty in building capacity, visitor engagement, and managing museums in crises. From 1997 until 2007, he worked for the Ohio Historical Society where he managed some of the Society’s premier restoration projects as Ohio celebrated its 200th anniversary. From 2007 to 2010, Dr. Hitch served as Director of the National Museum of the Turks and Caicos Islands, bringing the museum through the devastation of a direct hit from a category 5 hurricane. From 2011 to 2018, Dr. Hitch served as the Executive Director of the Imperial Valley Desert Museum, “the museum that never opened,” developing a funding plan, staff, and programs for a museum that had been under construction for 11 years. In 2016, he re-opened the Museum of the Aleutians after its closure in 2015. As the Executive Director of the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives in Honolulu, Hawaii, he toured a Hawaiian cultural production throughout New England in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the museum in 1819. Currently, Dr. Hitch serves as the Senior Curator of the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair and the Director of The Museum at Bethel Woods, where he established a five-year Oral History Initiative resulting in the development of a series of oral history pop ups across the United States.