Promoted: Denise Dea

In an ever-evolving profession, our advancing staff enriches the work and culture at Payette while cultivating the talent, creativity and growth among the very project teams they make up. With great pleasure we announce the advancement of 8 staff members. We’ll feature one staff member each day over the next couple of weeks. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating their achievements.

Denise Dea
Promoted to Wilson Studio Manager

Denise joined Payette in 2006 as the Wilson Studio Financial Coordinator. She’s had a significant leadership role in project management, staffing, mentoring, strategic planning and marketing. Denise has been teaching design and professional practice courses for 18 years. At the Boston Architectural College, she developed the thesis pedagogy for the Distance Masters program, organizes exhibitions/conferences, developed the Degree Project Studio and taught history and theory seminars, as well as multiple design studios. Denise received her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern California in 1992 and her Master of Design Studies in the History and Theory of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1994.

What inspires you?
Finding elegance in solving complex problems is a constant source of inspiration for me. Since my job deals with managing many types of people (project managers, principals and clients) through many different kinds of issues and problems, often, the solution is like putting together a puzzle. The challenge of ensuring that the pieces fit well inspires me to work harder. In particular, I have found that effective and transparent communication in written and visual form often is the most important part of the bridge between people; the challenge is that people perceive incoming information in different ways so there is a need to overcome this in either a universal or singularly unique way (complete opposites!) to come to a common understanding.

What is the best part of your job?
The best part of my job is working with a diverse group of colleagues. We are all so lucky to work in a collective environment made up of passionate individuals.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned so far?
Sometimes it’s not just the facts but how you put them together and find ways to explain them to someone else. Everything is a process and a design problem.

The sky is the limit: if you could work on anything, what would it be?
I love to cook and I would love to find the time to redesign my own kitchen in a way so that it can better accommodate the many techniques and raw materials that I use.

4 of 8 in a series about advancing staff members.