Cary Summers began his involvement with Museum of the Bible in 2010. Summers was promoted to president after serving as chief operating officer from 2012 to 2015.
Summers’ duties include overseeing a team of architects, design firms and other contractors building the 430,000-square-foot international Bible museum set to open in Washington in 2017. He also provides oversight to Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative, its worldwide traveling exhibits, and its high school Bible curriculum currently under development.
Summers’ museum-related activities take him around the world to negotiate strategic partnerships, arrange host sites for future traveling exhibits and manage a global network of institutions that house and research items from the Museum of the Bible Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts.
Before coming to Museum of the Bible, Summers was president and CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment/Silver Dollar City Corporation, one of the world’s largest theme attraction operators. He previously served as vice president for retail, catalog and wholesale for Bass Pro Shops, and he was general manager of Abercrombie and Fitch when it was the world’s oldest sporting goods company.
An entrepreneur, Summers has founded a number of consulting ventures that advise organizations, including those in the tourism and the theme-attraction industries. Summers founded Treasures of the Holy Land, an e-commerce enterprise that imports handcrafted goods made in Israel to the U.S., and serves as CEO of Nazareth Village in Israel, a re-creation of the first-century village where Jesus grew up.
Summers sits on a number of nonprofit boards and is board coordinator between the Miracle of Nazareth International Foundation USA and Nazareth Village Israel. He is a founding board member of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, an Israeli human rights group.
Summers graduated from the University of Texas. He and his wife, Jacque, live in Springfield, Missouri.