Long Island Children's Museum names new president, with plans to expand
Erika Floreska will take over as president of the Long Island Children’s Museum on June 3. Credit: LICM
The Long Island Children’s Museum is getting a new president starting June 3, whose vision for the future includes a new, permanent exhibit celebrating Long Island’s maritime culture and expanding the museum into a nearby building.
Erika Floreska, 51, a Baldwin resident who has spent the past three years as the museum’s director of development, will take over for Suzanne LeBlanc, who will retire after 17 years as president.
Floreska said she is excited to be taking on the leadership of the Uniondale museum and is especially proud of its theater program, its outreach into the community and its potential for future growth. “I get to be kind of a Pied Piper and cheerleader and evangelist who gets to articulate all of these things,” she said.
The museum selected Floreska to the role after carrying out a nationwide search, LeBlanc said. In the end, the museum decided the best candidate was here at home, which didn’t surprise LeBlanc. “When I interviewed and hired her [as director of development], I had in the back of my mind she would be a wonderful president,” LeBlanc said. LeBlanc, 73, said she is retiring to spend more time in Wales, where her daughter and granddaughter live.
Floreska will carry on LeBlanc’s planning and execution of a new, permanent exhibit called “Saltwater Stories,” which has been in development since 2019 and will feature fishermen and a fish market and “lifting the ocean’s lid” to expose its marine life, she said. It’s set to open in early 2025. “This is the first new permanent exhibit in the museum in seven to eight years,” she said.
She also aspires to grow the museum by physically expanding it into a nearby hangar. That building is dilapidated now, but she said she hopes to lead a capital campaign to develop it, connecting it by a walkway to the current museum building.
Floreska has worked at Manhattan’s Bloomingdale School of Music, the Tectonic Theater Project and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Before joining the museum in 2020, she had visited many times with her children, Zulnie, now 20, and Nigel, 18. Floreska’s husband, Roger, is a retail manager and former music teacher.
Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.
