STEPHANIE VILLASENOR
General Counsel
Norton Simon Museum
Stephanie Villasenor serves as vice president, general counsel and secretary at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. She started at the Norton Simon Museum in 2010, initially as tax manager and in-house attorney. In 2013, she was promoted to general counsel for the museum.
The Norton Simon Museum was closed to the public for 14 months, from March 2020 to May 2021, which is the longest period of time that the museum was ever closed. Over the past 18 months, Villasenor has been responsible for navigating the challenging new world of COVID legal compliance, ensuring that the museum’s remote staff was able to quickly pivot to serving the public through engaging new online, educational content, including lectures, live art making programs and other publications, while the onsite staff continued to perform the essential function of protecting the Museum’s priceless collections of art and antiquities and preserving it for generations to come. Villasenor continues to be responsible for developing and implementing all of the museum’s COVID policies and procedures, from educating museum staff on the ever-evolving pandemic related regulations and rule compliance to maintaining the safest environment possible for the museum going public.
Since 2016, Villasenor has also been serving as an advisory board member of the Gloria Borges WunderGlo Foundation, which supports cancer patients by funding research to find a cure for colon cancer. Villasenor is an active member of the foundation and regularly helps with fundraising events and also assists the foundation with its tax compliance.Â
