Designing the Future of Southern Nevada: A Leadership Portrait of Danielle Casey

Some leaders arrive quietly and reshape a region over time. Others step into a community at the exact moment of transition, bringing experience, discipline, and a clear understanding of what’s possible.
Danielle Casey, President & CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA), is unmistakably the second kind.

I met Danielle at several Vegas Chamber and LVGEA events, where I also photographed her. Even in those fast-moving environments, she carried a presence that stood out: calm, intentional, and grounded. There was a mix of composure shaped by multiple markets, curiosity for how communities grow, and the forward-driven energy of someone who truly believes in what Southern Nevada can become.

Later, when I listened to her full story on the Workforce Connections podcast, the pieces came together. Her discipline, her clarity, and her regional vision are not just professional traits, they’re the foundation of the way she leads, builds, and influences the long-term future of this region.

A Childhood Written in Bases and Runways

Danielle’s story starts the way many resilient leadership stories do: in motion. She was a military kid, the daughter of an Air Force Academy graduate whose assignments moved the family from base to base.

She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, at a military hospital that was later converted into a women’s prison, one of those family details her father finds funny and her mother absolutely does not. From there, her childhood traced a map of American aerospace and defense: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Montgomery, Alabama for Air Command and Staff College, and finally Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana.

By middle school and high school, she had already learned what many people never fully master as adults: how to adapt quickly, how to read a room, and how to build connection in new places. Her accent carries pieces of everywhere she’s lived, to the point that people often can’t guess where she’s from. That sense of being “from many places at once” would later become one of her greatest strengths in regional economic development.

Her first job came the day she turned fifteen, at an Eckerd drugstore. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it seeded the habits that still define her leadership today: show up, work hard, learn fast, and never assume any job is beneath you.

A Nonlinear Path Into Economic Development

Like many economic developers, Danielle didn’t start out knowing this was her field. Her early career moved through museums and nonprofits, including the Heard Museum of Native Culture and Art in Phoenix, a renowned institution dedicated to Native American history and art.

Housing costs and a long commute nudged her into the next chapter. She bought a home in what was then a small community on the far edge of the Phoenix metro area: the City of Maricopa. At the time, it was a town of roughly 1,500 people, surrounded by farmland and poised on the edge of explosive growth.

Looking for work closer to home, she joined the young City of Maricopa as the twelfth employee on the books, an assistant to the city manager. Sixty days later, the city council made economic development a priority and turned to her: help the consultants, build what we need, figure it out.

She did more than figure it out. Over the next several years, Maricopa grew from 1,500 residents to about 45,000. Danielle helped the city stand up its first redevelopment agency, its first economic development strategic plan, and tools to deal with major challenges like floodplain issues and rapid infrastructure demands. It was a crash course in building a community almost from scratch, and she loved it.

From there, she moved to the City of Scottsdale as Economic Development Director. Under her leadership, Scottsdale earned six awards of excellence from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC), achieved status as an Accredited Economic Development Organization, and adopted its first five-year economic development strategic plan in more than fifteen years. The results were real and measurable: billions in total economic impact, thousands of new jobs, and significant new capital investment.

Those accomplishments opened doors to regional roles. She joined the Greater Sacramento Economic Council as Executive Vice President, leading business development, marketing, investor engagement, research, and strategic initiatives. Even through the disruptions of COVID-19, her team met all their annual metrics and job creation goals and launched a regional business retention and expansion program.

Then came the opportunity to lead her own shop in Albuquerque as President & CEO of the Albuquerque Regional Economic Alliance (AREA). The organization was at a turning point after a long-tenured leader; Danielle helped transform a traditional business association into a mission-based public–private partnership, completing a regional strategic plan and repositioning the organization for the future.

What’s striking, listening to her describe these chapters on the Workforce Connections podcast, is that none of these moves were part of a master plan. She wasn’t chasing titles. Each time, someone called with an opportunity she wasn’t actively seeking. What she consistently chose was impact, places where her experience could help a region evolve, diversify, and grow.

Why Las Vegas, and Why Now

By the time Las Vegas came calling, Danielle had already led and rebuilt organizations in Arizona, California, and New Mexico. She could have stayed where she was. Instead, she said yes, with one non-negotiable condition: her next move had to be to a place she could imagine retiring in.

Las Vegas wasn’t a stranger to her. Her family’s connection to the city goes back generations; it’s where her grandparents reunited “after the war,” where her aunt married, where her mother and stepfather married, and where she herself eventually married. Growing up in Phoenix, she visited regularly. At one time, Las Vegas was simply the family meeting point; over time, it became something closer to a second home.

So when the LVGEA board began its search for a new President & CEO, and the opportunity surfaced, it wasn’t just another job posting. It was a chance to help shape a region she already loved, a “global small town,” as she calls it, with 2.1 million people and a core leadership group where “all 50 of us know each other.”

For a Las Vegas leadership photographer, that’s exactly how it feels capturing portraits in this ecosystem: close-knit, high-impact, and deeply interconnected.

The Work of Diversifying a “Global Small Town”

In our conversations and in her podcast interview, Danielle returns to a central theme: real diversification requires clarity, alignment, and shared ownership. It’s not enough to say, “We need to diversify the economy.” The harder question is: diversify into what, and by how much?

Her experience across Phoenix, Sacramento, and Albuquerque gives her an unusually wide lens. She has seen regions transform from call-center markets to advanced manufacturing hubs. She has watched universities and cities collaborate to design an economy for the talent and industries they want, not just the ones that happen to show up.

She also understands what it means to depend heavily on a single industry. New Mexico’s reliance on oil and gas, Sacramento’s concentration of government jobs, and Southern Nevada’s dependence on tourism and gaming all share the same risk: when one sector stumbles, the whole region feels it.

At LVGEA, her focus is on helping Southern Nevada:

• Identify the right growth industries for our natural assets and constraints
• Attract companies that bring in net new wealth and high-quality jobs
• Support existing employers through business retention and expansion
• Align economic development with workforce development, education, and quality of life

She emphasizes that companies don’t choose municipalities; they choose regions. That’s where a regional organization like LVGEA becomes essential, keeping Southern Nevada on the “short list” when site selectors and corporate leaders evaluate markets for major investments.

Building the Talent Pipeline

One of the reasons Danielle and Workforce Connections align so strongly is a shared conviction: economic development and workforce development are inseparable.

Access to talent and the competitive cost of that talent is consistently the top site selection factor for companies. A market can have beautiful buildings and competitive incentives, but if there isn’t a pipeline of skilled people to fill the roles, deals will not stick.

Danielle sees LVGEA’s role as both a connector and a translator. LVGEA tracks economic indicators, identifies future growth industries, and then shares that data with workforce and education partners so training programs can be designed around real demand. She wants local students to see real opportunity here, not feel forced to leave Nevada because they don’t think high-quality careers exist at home.

Her commitment to talent doesn’t stop with students. As a Certified Economic Developer (CEcD), Economic Development Finance Professional (EDFP), and incoming Chair of the International Economic Development Council, she is heavily involved in training the next generation of economic developers. She teaches for the Oklahoma University Economic Development Institute and is working with peers in Nevada to create a more formal pipeline for economic development professionals, open not just to practitioners, but also to elected officials and community leaders who need to understand the fundamentals of the field.

It’s another way Danielle turns her experience into infrastructure: not just building projects, but building people.

A Leader Who Never Stopped Being Curious

For someone with such a technical, data-driven profession, Danielle’s academic roots are surprisingly human. Her bachelor’s degree is in anthropology, and that lens, curiosity about people, culture, and how communities organize themselves, shows up everywhere in how she leads.

She loves history, museums, artifacts, architecture, and the stories behind places. She can talk about regional water policy and then, in the next breath, tell you about rebuilding a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle with her dad using babysitting money. She and her husband camp, travel, and occasionally escape on cruises with her parents, who have fully embraced cruise life.

When she describes her ideal free day, it still includes learning: a stack of books, a new place to explore, or time out in nature thinking about what’s next.

In the “Against the Wall” bonus segment of the podcast, she described herself in three words: energetic, committed, and maybe a little loud. From my perspective behind the camera, I would add one more: intentional. Nothing about her leadership feels casual. Every move is part of a long-term commitment to the community she serves.

A Portrait of the Future

Photographing Danielle as the new President & CEO of LVGEA felt less like documenting a single moment and more like capturing the beginning of a chapter Southern Nevada will be reading for years.

In portrait work, especially with executives and civic leaders, my job isn’t just to make someone look polished. It’s to reflect the qualities that brought them to this moment: resilience, clarity, optimism, and responsibility. With Danielle, those qualities are written in the way she carries herself: the military-kid adaptability, the museum-lover’s eye for context, the economic developer’s focus on outcomes, and the daughter and granddaughter who has been meeting family in Las Vegas since she was thirteen.

As a Las Vegas headshot photographer specializing in leadership and executive portraits, I see how much our region is changing. New teams, new stadiums, new industries, and new leaders are shaping what Southern Nevada will be in the next decade. Danielle Casey stands at the center of that transformation, helping design an economy that keeps our kids here, welcomes new companies, and builds a more resilient future.

This portrait is only one frame in that story, but it’s an honor to help record this moment as she steps into one of the most important leadership roles in Nevada.