Biography | Josh D'Amaro — The Hilltop Degree That Ended the Sculpture Plan

People who meet Josh D'Amaro as Disney's chief executive tend to start the story in a theme park.

The first public credential is older and quieter.

He was born on 10 February 1971 in Medfield, Massachusetts, and left Medfield High School in 1989.

He first enrolled at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs to study painting and sculpture.

By the sophomore year he decided an artist's income would not support the life he wanted, and he transferred to Georgetown University.

In 1993 he received a bachelor's degree in business administration from Georgetown.

The business school later took the McDonough name and, in 2009, moved into the Rafik B. Hariri Building.

That classroom block did not exist when he graduated.

The building a visitor can still stand in front of is Healy Hall, the National Historic Landmark finished in 1879 on the main Hilltop campus.

Smithmeyer and Pelz designed the Gothic and Romanesque pile that still holds the president's office, Gaston Hall, and Riggs Library.

Its listed coordinates sit at 38.907278 north, 77.072722 west.

Georgetown's own later programs have hosted D'Amaro as an alumnus talking about the switch from studio work to marketing and finance.

The useful fact is not the later speech.

It is that the man who would run parks, ships, and then the whole company left this campus with a business degree after abandoning a sculpture major.

After commencement he went back to Boston and took a finance job at the Gillette Company before applying to Disney in 1998.

Healy Hall is the pin that belongs to that change of course.

The later glass atrium on Cooper Field is a different decade.

Photo: Lokeswari, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons