Tampa museum's director believes service is fundamental for happiness

TAMPA, Fla. - Zora Carrier is a historian when it comes to photographic art.

Carrier believes learning about the arts leads to a better life and her story is what's right with Tampa Bay.

As the director of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, Carrier helps curate and preserve one of the most important pieces of education and history: pictures and the methods used to take or make them.

"I feel very blessed that I can actually have my daily job. were I love it. It's a love at first sight," Carrier explained. 

She was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in India where she learned what she says are the keys to a good life.

"We find happiness in other things, contributing, doing things for other people. It's extremely rewarding," Carrier said. "Giving is sometimes more rewarding and brings us more happiness than receiving."

She brought those lessons to the U.S. in 2004 and moved to Tampa in 2014.

"Working in a museum, it's a great spectrum of small and big tasks that we deliver to people," she said.

She believes that non-profits offer a more satisfying life than your average high paying job.

"Cultural institutions and the non-profit world are delivering that because it's really something that has enormous value but it's hard to do a price on it, right," Carrier said. "It's about being able to give on a level that is really hard to put a number on or some kind of amount of money."

Carrier has found fulfillment not in money, but in the value of serving others. For more about the museum, visit https://www.fmopa.org/.