Santa Fe-based Meow Wolf announced on Wednesday it has brought on two executives who will join the company's leadership team.
The hiring of Katie Ibay as chief people officer and John Lee joins as chief product and technology officer are among the first high-profile additions to the company's executive ranks since Jose Tolosa was named CEO on Jan. 12.
Ibay joins Meow Wolf from Google, where she provided human resources market leadership, according to a news release. Her career includes stops as the head of human resources for Fandango and a vice president of human resources for a division of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group. Both are owned by NBCUniversal.
She replaces Erin Hirsch who left the arts and entertainment company in December after being hired in the fall of 2020.
Lee will oversee digital, platform and IT aspects of Meow Wolf. He most recently led MGM Resorts’ direct-to-consumer strategy for its U.S. properties and increased revenues from guest rooms, restaurants and live entertainment and attractions, according to the news release.
Lee, who also held leadership product and technology roles at Sephora and Travelzoo, replaces Barbara Ford Grant, who left the company in January after being hired in November of 2020 and tasked with developing a platform that will "deliver a radical new form of convergent and personalized storytelling."
When asked about the new hires, Tolosa told Albuquerque Business First he was spending a lot of his time building the Meow Wolf team — with a focus on key areas.
"If we have a creatively driven organization, you need to have your soft areas around people really covered," he said. "And if I am trying to hire a world-class management team, I also needed a great HR leader, so I could not be happier in welcoming Katie Ibay. … Technology is an important component of taking the Meow Wolf universe beyond its current physical form, so we also spent a lot of time on pursuing a chief product and technology officer and we couldn’t be happier to have found John."
The executive hires come at a time of renewed growth for Meow Wolf. In May, the company announced it will create two new permanent installations in Houston and Grapevine, Texas, which is part of the Dallas metropolitan area. The first of the exhibitions will open in 2023 in Grapevine, with the exhibit in Houston's Fifth Ward neighborhood and historic district scheduled to open the following year.
The expansion would bring the company's total number of planned exhibits back to five after two similar projects were announced only to be shelved. Back in 2019, Meow Wolf announced plans for a 75,000-square-foot exhibit with a 400-room hotel in Phoenix. Two years later, in a statement attributed to the company's Office of the CEO, the company confirmed it was sidelining a hotel concept.
Meow Wolf then said it "reevaluated" its original plan for an exhibit in Washington, D.C., adding in a statement that "we are looking at several options as to what an exhibition in DC will entail."
Meow Wolf got its start in Santa Fe back in 2016 with the House of Eternal Return, but nowadays the company looks a lot different.
Vince Kadlubek stepped down from the CEO role in 2019, making way for a trio of executives — Carl Christensen, Ali Rubinstein and Jim Ward — to take the lead. The C-suite changed again with the hiring of Tolosa, a former ViacomCBS exec.
In between, Meow Wolf opened the Omega Mart exhibit in Las Vegas and the Convergence Station in Denver. Combined the three exhibits have entertained more than 3,000,000 visitors.
