Cedarburg native Ellen Censky aims to keep Milwaukee Public Museum on the cutting edge

Ellen Censky's life and career have come full circle.

She's the new president and chief executive officer of the Milwaukee Public Museum, a place she knows well, from every nook and cranny of the facility to its storied 137-year history.

And she is proud to be the first woman to lead the institution and said she hopes that "it's an inspiration to every little girl out there to know that you can go off and do anything you want.

"You can go off in the field and get stopped by a jaguar, which did happen to me, and you can survive it. And you can survive it just as well as any guy does. Maybe even better."

This isn't some steppingstone job for Censky. It's really personal.

As a grade school student in Cedarburg, she recalls visiting the museum for the first time.

In 1977, she landed her first museum job here, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a degree in zoology.

And after leading museums in Connecticut and Oklahoma, she returned home a decade ago to help care for her aging mother and take a role as senior vice president and academic dean at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

And now, after leading the institution on an interim basis, she's the boss, taking on the greatest challenge of her career.

The museum is seeking a new home and it's Censky and others who will have to make it happen, through site selection, design and ultimately raising tens of millions of dollars for the project.

At 63, she's not looking to climb another professional rung.

"That's why I am committed to this project," Censky said in an interview Wednesday. "Because what a great way to cap off your career, to first of all open a new museum, and secondly, do it in your own community."

The museum conducted a national search for its new director, assembling a field of 118 candidates.

Even though she was named the interim leader in September 2018, after the abrupt resignation of her predecessor, Censky thought long and hard about applying for the permanent position.

But the longer she was on the job, the more excited she became.

"I thought, you know, I would really love to be able to take this museum to the next step," she said. The museum has been cutting edge at so many key points in its history."

After she was named Tuesday to the position, both Tim Byrne, chair of the Milwaukee Public Museum Board of Directors, and Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele used the same word to describe Censky.

They called her "visionary."

Censky, who has a doctorate in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, studied reptiles and amphibians.

She jokes that growing up in a family of six brothers, her siblings were always throwing some creepy crawly creature her way. The reality is, she always liked to be out in nature, whether on an uncle's farm or camping with the family.

When she first got to college, she thought she was going to become a veterinarian. But she was introduced to a teaching assistant in a zoology class and discovered that he was studying lions in Africa.

“I thought, ‘Wow, I didn't think you could do something like that.’ ”

She was hooked on zoology.

Her first job at the museum was working with an entomologist who was looking at the evolution of beetles in South America.

"My job was to pin those beetles. And I'm going to say it, pull their genitalia out and mount them on a little point. And I swear I did like 10,000 of them," she said.

Asked what her most important museum job was, and she turns the question around in a way that puts a focus on the importance of being involved with a team.

"Museums don't function without every single position in the museum," she said. "So I wouldn't say that any job is more important than the other, they all have a function."

She led the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and helped spearhead capital campaigns and expansions at both institutions.

That past experience will be relevant to what faces the Milwaukee Public Museum, which announced in 2017 that it was looking for a new state-of-the-art facility that could cost more than $100 million.

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But she's also keenly aware that she's the museum's fourth leader in the last 10 years.

"What this institution needs is stability and a steady movement forward," she said. "And so, we will continue to work on that new museum, which is going to be a big movement forward. But what we want to have it as a steady move."