We hope you find these Staff Spotlights a great way to get to know your colleagues!

This month, meet Paul Ayers, Coordinator, Information Guide Volunteers, Visitor Experience Department.

What do you do at the AGO?

I coordinate the Information Guide volunteers – the 100+ volunteers who greet our visitors, assist them with way-finding and provide information about what to see and do in the galleries.

Is there something that you’d be willing to share that many people would not know about you?

With the right kind of music, I can seriously cut a rug.

What is your all-time favourite movie, musical artist, or book, and why?

This is the kind of question where I feel like I’m supposed to genuflect to some Important Art House – and I came to the AGO from Cinematheque Ontario – but honestly, nothing has ever topped the rush I felt coming out of a matinee on a fine summer’s day in 1977 when I was ten years old and the first Star Wars just came out.

I might be more of a grownup when it comes to books and music, however. One book that I keep going back to year after year is A Pattern Language, which profoundly affected my understanding of how individuals and communities can be shaped and supported by our built environment. Spin a little Steve Reich over a few chapters of that book and I’m in my happy place.

Do you have a favourite work of art in the collection?

Over Vitebsk by Marc Chagall, hands down. It’s the first work of art that ever prompted a synesthetic response in me…you know when you are hiking or snowshoeing through the bush in the winter and you hear the sound of the wind blowing through the trees? That’s what I heard when I first looked at that painting.