He is the executive director of Fayetteville Downtown Partners, which advocates for downtown economic growth and organizes the Fayetteville Arts Festival. She is managing artistic director of TheatreSquared, Northwest Arkansas’ first professional theater company. Individually they are successful, but together this couple has made quite an impact on the local arts scene. In the short time they have called Fayetteville home, Dan Hintz and Kassie Misiewicz have become prevalent public figures as energetic arts advocates. This is the story of how they got here.

Roads well-traveled Daniel Martin Hintz was born Aug. 7, 1972, and grew up the oldest of three children in Sherman Park, an inner-city neighborhood in Milwaukee. It was a racially diverse neighborhood, and the Hintz family exercised an open-door policy that welcomed writers and vagabonds alike, Hintz said.

His father, Martin Hintz, was an acclaimed travel writer, and his mother, Sandy Wright, was the owner of Milwaukee’s first woman-owned marketing and public relations firm. They provided their son with early examples of community involvement, helping found Milwaukee’s Irish Fest, one of the largest in the world, Hintz said.

From third through eighth grades, Hintz attended creative arts magnet schools that helped establish his deep appreciation for the arts. In eighth grade, he co-authored a book with his father, “ Wisconsin off the Beaten Path. ” They co-authored another book, “ Day Trips from Milwaukee, ” in 1995 when Dan was in his early 20 s.

As the neighborhood got rougher, the family relocated to rural Wisconsin where Hintz attended Arrowhead High School “ in the middle of nowhere, ” he said. While in high school, Hintz helped start a video program and performed in plays. He credits the arts with helping him keep his sanity, he said. Upon graduation in 1990, all Hintz wanted to do was get out of Wisconsin. So he moved to Moscow.

At age 17, Hintz joined the Youth for Understanding student exchange program. The Soviet Union had just opened up to such programs, and the group was one of the first allowed behind the Iron Curtain since the late 1950 s, Hintz said.

“ I jumped at the chance to check out what for my whole life has been ‘ the evil empire, ’” he said. “ My first impression is that people are real no matter where you go, and you have to listen…. People were the same, it was just the governments that were goofy. They don’t have 37 boxes of cereal to choose from, but kids were the same, worried about girls, clothes and music. ”

Unfortunately, because of safety concerns, Hintz’s stint in the USSR lasted only about two months. Upon his return, he embarked on what he called an ADD approach to life.

“ Once I’ve done something, I’m finished with that, so what’s next ? ” he said.

He enrolled at the University of St. Thomas with a theater scholarship. One year later, he transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to study film. The next year, he followed a love interest to Venezuela where he worked for her father’s construction company in a small town outside Caracas.

“ I had time to travel and hang out, ” Hintz said. “ It was great. There’s something to be said about what I do now as to what I did then. Now, we’re sowing seeds that might not manifest for 10 years. With construction, you can see the finished product immediately. ”

After returning to the States in 1996, Hintz finished his film degree at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “ Dead broke” from his Venezuela trip, he worked as a waiter for four months before being lured into the camaraderie of the kitchen. That led to six years of on-the-job training under several chefs in Boulder and Milwaukee to learn all he could. “ My dream at some point in life was to open a restaurant, ” Hintz said. As a child, he would scour the bathroom, where he would set up a table, create a menu and serve his parents sandwiches. A few years later he would help open Milwaukee’s California Grille, and through the years he would continue to work in restaurants off and on when he missed cooking. Next for Hintz was a “ really big road trip across the country, ” he said. During a stop in Portland, Ore., he encountered a girl wearing an Ameri-Corps T-shirt. He asked her what AmeriCorps was, and the next thing he knew he was interviewing for a job. “ I had no idea what it was for, ” he said. For the next year, Hintz coordinated programs and planned events for at-risk youth. “ This is when I realized I loved community development, ” he said. “ I realized I could feed people in a different kind of way. ” In 1998, Hintz returned to Milwaukee and started his own company, Beanstalk Consulting Group, which helped nonprofit groups explore creative ways to become selfsufficient. Through his consultant work, Hintz assisted with downtown development, worked with business owners and politicians, and helped open an art gallery and music venues. He also worked as a teaching artist and took a job overseeing the K-1 division of the First Stage Children’s Theater summer education program. It was this job that introduced him to his future wife. To be or not to be

The oldest of eight

children, Kassie Marie

Misiewicz was born Dec. 24, 1968, and grew up in South Bend, Ind., where her father taught accounting at the University of Notre Dame. She attended Catholic schools and became interested in social justice early on, she said.

While attending Notre Dame, she spent her sophomore year in Spain and her senior year in El Salvador but decided to forgo Spanish as a major and obtained a theater degree instead.

She had always been interested in theater but was reluctant to pursue it as a career, Misiewicz said. As children, she and her siblings would perform plays for her parents.

“ I was the director, the actor and the writer and would tell my younger siblings what to do, ” she said.

After graduation in 1991, she spent a year in Oakland, Calif., as a member of Holy Cross Associates, a national Catholic volunteer program. She lived in a community with five other recent college graduates, and the experience taught her about simple living, she said.

Working as a volunteer food bank coordinator for the Center for AIDS Services, Misiewicz was introduced to a whole new sexually charged, open subculture. It was eye-opening for a sheltered Catholic girl, she said.

In 1993, she gained her first experience working for professional children’s theater with Nashville Children’s Theatre in Nashville, Tenn.

“ It changed my life, ” she said. “ I was working with people who enjoyed what they were doing and cared about their audience. There was a lot of great mentorship … and I finally could say ‘ I know what I want to do, ’ and I wanted to be the artistic director of my own children’s theater, ” she said.

That dream was finally realized in July with TheatreSquared’s production of “ Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” at the Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios.

Next, Misiewicz enrolled in graduate school at Arizona State University, where she received a master of fine arts degree in theater for young audiences in 1995. After graduate school, she spent the last of her loan money on a two-month trip to Europe before returning home to figure out her next step. She took a job at a family friend’s jewelry store, “ got talked into” taking over the drama program at her old high school and started the children’s theater series at The South Bend Civic Center. She also taught youth acting and theater classes for one year at Notre Dame as an adjunct professor and directed the university’s production of “ A Christmas Carol. ” She then accepted a job as assistant artistic director of First Stage Children’s Theater in Milwaukee where she met “ this guy named Dan Hintz. ” They had a lot in common, she said. Besides a fundamental interest in theater, both grew up in hospitable homes where the doors were open to anyone coming over for dinner or needing a place to stay. They both also had adopted biracial siblings. After they had been dating for six months, Hintz took a job as the youth development director for Downtown YMCA in Seattle. When he asked Misiewicz to move with him, she was training for the Chicago marathon and all set to make her home in Milwaukee. But she said yes. Life together

After two years in

Seattle, Hintz took

a job with Pyramid Communications, a corporate company that oversaw the national campaigns of nonprofit organizations such as nature conservancies, the Humane Society of the USA, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others.

“ It was my first time working in a for-profit world, and it was very different. Time is money, ” Hintz said. “ It was about six months of getting my butt kicked. ”

He left the position to become managing director for the Preschool of the Arts in Seattle.

And although Misiewicz had decided to leave theater to pursue a higher-paying career field, she was attracted to a position with Seattle Children’s Theater as director of education and outreach.

On May 26, 2002, the couple were married at the Irish Heritage Center in Milwaukee. They began researching areas to put down roots where they also hoped to start a family and a theater company. They were looking into Minneapolis and Chicago, which were both close to family and had thriving theater scenes, when Dan’s mother, Sandy Wright, who has lived in Eureka Springs for about nine years, suggested Fayetteville.

Hintz’s first visit to the town he is now paid to promote and develop was not very pleasurable, he said. He visited Fayetteville briefly in 1999 when the Walton Arts Center hired him to teach a writing class.

“ I stayed at the Hilton; it was dark and there were no signs. I had no idea that Dickson Street existed. … so I went and ate food at the Hilton, ” he said. “ That dark, cold night of dark streets stuck with me for a long time. ”

But on paper and through word of mouth, Fayetteville was very appealing.

“ There was no professional theater company, the market was so raw, and the optimism was infectious. People really sold Fayetteville, and what impressed us was that people really believe in Northwest Arkansas, in what they’re selling and what they’re doing. And that is so powerful, ” Hintz said.

When they first moved to town, Misiewicz was hired to teach drama at the Walton Arts Center, and Hintz hit the ground running, getting to know the local players and participating in the public design process of the Downtown Master Plan. It wasn’t long before Mayor Dan Coody tapped him to oversee the 2004 Autumnfest activities. His success with that endeavor led to his being named interim administrator of Fayetteville Downtown Partners.

When they arrived in Fayetteville about two and a half years ago, Hintz and Misiewicz had four goals: Buy a house, start a family, found a theater company and find Hintz an enjoyable job that combines his love for economic development and the arts.

They accomplished all four within a year.

They bought their first house on 12 th Street in south Fayetteville in April 2004. The house, with bright yellow walls and corrugated steel roofing, was designed and built by University of Arkansas architecture students using a Department of Housing and Urban Development grant.

On March 30, 2005, Maeve Marie Misiewicz Hintz was born. In April 2005, Hintz was named executive director of Fayetteville Downtown Partners. And in May, TheatreSquared, Northwest Arkansas’ first professional theater company, staged its first play with Misiewicz as its managing artistic director.

It is the smallest community they’ve ever lived in, but it looks like they may be putting down roots.

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