St. Pete Emeritus: Susana Weymouth

There’s an old saying that Susana Weymouth has lived by, all her professional life: “One feels fulfilled,” it goes, “when passion meets purpose.”

The arts have always been Weymouth’s passion. And as she prepares to retire from her five year position as Chief Development Officer for The Florida Orchestra, Weymouth is looking back on a career built almost exclusively on purpose.

Prior to TFO, she served six years as Executive Director of the nonprofit Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture & the Arts.

To encourage philanthropic giving to the orchestra – she dislikes the term fundraising – Weymouth’s philosophy is listening. Paying attention.

She works with each donor individually. “Everybody is a world unto themselves,” she explains. “And I try to not ask them to give, or what to give, or tell them why to give, but discover what’s making them tick. What is inspiring to them?”

She is The Florida Orchestra’s biggest fan and most vocal supporter. When a potential donor experiences the orchestra, she asks “What does it inspire? And how do we match your philosophical desires, whether it be a musician, one of our education programs, or a piece of music in a concert?”

Weymouth thinks of herself as a “matchmaker to inspire joyful giving. That’s all I do.”

Her matchmaking led to an anonymous gift of $10 million in November 2025, the largest in the orchestra’s history.

Of course, she knows who the donor is, but mum’s the word. “Joyful giving is a lot easier if you know people and they trust you,” she smiles.

Yann and Susana Weymouth. Photo provided.

Weymouth and her husband of nearly 40 years, famed architect Yann Weymouth, are relocating to Savannah, Georgia. Susanna has a medical condition that requires her to stay off her feet for prolonged periods.

Her “unstoppable momentum,” noted TFO President and CEO Ignacio Barrón Viela, has “strengthened this organization in ways that will endure well into the future.”

“It’s not me,” Weymouth protests. “I’m just an instrument. Pun intended.”

She was born Susanna Pola in Havana, and was 2 years old when her parents, both of them lawyers, fled Castro’s Cuba for Washington, D.C.

Her middle class upbringing, she recalls, was nevertheless augmented by constant exposure to culture. The Polas went to the symphony, to art galleries and museums, to nearby Civil War battlefields. “This is what we did, every weekend,” Weymouth says.

Growing up bilingual, she graduated from Georgetown University with a BA in Chinese Studies (Mandarin is her third language) and began her career at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. She made her first trip to China in 1979, the year US-Chinese relations were normalized.

One of her Beijing besties was architect Chien Chung (Didi) Pei, whose father was internationally renowned architect I.M. Pei. “There’s someone I think you should meet,” Didi told her; he was talking about the Chief of Design on I.M. Pei’s renovations and additions, including the iconic glass pyramid, to the Louvre Museum in Paris.

His name was Yann Weymouth.

She considered herself a jet-setting career woman with no interest in marriage or family, but things changed when Pei the younger introduced them during a weekend in New York, when they all happened to be there on business.

Didi Pei, Susana laughs, “knew us better than we knew ourselves.” Susana Pola and Yann Weymouth married in Paris in January, 1988. “So ours is a Chinese arranged marriage,” she laughs.

Their son Wells was born in Paris.

The family lived in London for five years in the 1990s; while the always-in-demand Yann worked on global projects, Susana worked as Development Consultant for the National Film and Television School.

In 1998, they relocated to Miami. Yann designed the Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Experiential Music, at the University of Miami. He would later engineer a creative redesign of the Frost Museum of Art.

“I think that Yann is one of the world’s great unsung heroes,” Weymouth says. “He’s too humble. But fortunately he does have a Cuban, loud-mouthed wife to talk about him. Because he doesn’t talk about himself.”

The next move was to South Tampa, in 2001. Yann designed expansions and renovations of Sarasota’s John and Mable Ringling Museum, and the Hazel Hough Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

In 2011, he designed St. Petersburg’s surreal, concrete-and-glass Dali Museum of Art. The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, which opened in 2018, was another Yann Weymouth design. Its grainy southwestern American “arroyo” look is 180 degrees from the curves and bubbles of the Dali.

All the while, the couple were patrons and donors, on both sides of the bay. Susana sat on boards and advisory committees. “I think that everything I’ve done, and everything Yann has done in the Tampa Bay area, comes from this deep sense of responsibility,” she says. “That we have felt all our lives.”

This came from her parents, she’s certain. “It was inculcated in me that the arts are essential. The arts are what make us human.”

Her tenure at the TBBCA, an advocacy and support chapter of Americans For the Arts, followed. “The arts are good for business; business is good for the arts. The arts are an economic engine. So in proselytizing that, and living it through the different programs, we walked the walk and talked the talk.”

At the height of the Covid pandemic, in 2020, Weymouth signed on with The Florida Orchestra. She was amazed, she remembers, at the dedication the musicians and conductors displayed by performing concerts – 86 of them – to socially-distanced audiences, while being kept six feet apart from one another onstage.

They bought a vintage 1958 home in Pass-a-Grille, which Yann remodeled and redesigned. Sadly, it was nearly destroyed during Hurricane Helene in 2024. Hurricane Milton finished the job a few weeks later.

The couple have been residing in rented homes ever since.

Their son is a doctor serving with the U.S. Army. His parents are relocating to a home he owns, but doesn’t currently live in, in Savannah. Yann is 84 and has cut back on his workload.

As for Susana, a little medical hiccup might slow her down, but her “unstoppable momentum” will continue. She intends to work for TFO, and the development team she built, in an advisory capacity, via the phone and the computer.

She’ll keep combining her passion with purpose. “We have this amazing, world-class orchestra,” she enthuses. “We have these musicians, who from age dot have done nothing else. They started taking lessons at 3, 4, 5. They never stopped. These are the highest level of excellence.”

“We’ve lived in New York, Miami, D.C., London and Paris. We know good orchestras. And we really believe what we have is remarkable. And to be valued. And that there is no great city without a great orchestra.”