Donald Keough, News Editor–
Liv Gjestvang worked on her first computer server on the floor of a coat closet.
She had just recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in English and was working at David Zwirner, an art gallery in New York.
Before she was hired, she was asked if she knew computers well.
“I thought he meant Photoshop or something like that,” Gjestvang said.
But when asked to work on the computer server, she had to enlist help from two owners of a company named Cyber City, inc. which assists art galleries in need of technological support.
“They came in to help with my network, because I didn’t know what was going on,” Gjestvang said. “Then they ended up offering me a job to go work with them. That was really where I started.”
24 years later, Gjestvang was hired as the chief information officer (CIO) of Denison. She was recently given the 2025 EDUCAUSE organizational culture award and 2024 Ohio CIO of the Year ORBIE Award. She’s also a mother of three children, including being a surrogate mother. She has directed a film which won numerous film festival awards and has worked with companies such as PBS and Amazon.
Her journey to her position and current accolades come from a career which is a winding blend of information technology work, artistic creation and advocacy. She said that she loves “the intersection of technology, innovation, creativity, education,” which generalizes the diverse career and life experiences she’s had.
Throughout her time at Denison, she credits much of her work to her colleagues.
“I work with a really talented team,” Gjestvang said. “Having directors who lead different areas is super helpful, and I’m really trying to listen, advise and collaborate with them.”
Although one may imagine a CIO buried in the technical side of informational services, her position is much more wide-reaching.
“I am not, like my team would probably tell you, a person who’s gonna go home and read about, cybersecurity, security protocols, or routers, in my free time because it’s my favorite thing to do,” Gjestvang said. “I’m much more interested in strategy and mission.”
Her typical day starts with her and her wife helping get their children to school. She then heads from her home in Columbus to Denison. She tends to park up The Hill from the ITS building so that she can bike to work. Once she’s at work, there isn’t one way to describe what her day might look like, but it often centers around “really strong collaboration” of departments and parts of administration.
“It’s very helpful to be able to be at the table and thinking about and engaging with the strategic work across the whole college,” Gjestvang said. “IT has historically not always been at that table. But technology is integrated into every part of the college, and being there and hearing about what people are trying to do and being able to support them is important.”
She said that bringing these teams together is one of the main focal points of her job.
“I’m super interested in how teams work together.” Gjestvang said. “How do we ensure that we have a really thriving campus environment that is welcoming and engaging for different kinds of students to learn… that’s what I’m super interested in.”
Besides meeting with departments of the college to discuss IT services, some of her work involves physically going to parts of campus to see what’s working and what isn’t. This past week, she’s followed a tour that prospective students take to closely examine the spaces students move through while visiting campus.
Gjestvang and her team’s working process is always changing. She said that focusing on how their teams decide to spend their time more can refine their own processes.
“It’s really about thinking of what’s most important and how can we make sure our work stays relevant and also engaging,” Gjestvang said.
The technological field is also constantly changing, according to Gejestvang, so she and her team “has to constantly learn.”
“Nothing is the same as it was even a year ago,” Gjestvang said. “People need to be able to have an incredible amount of expertise and discipline, and also be able to be curious and find time and ways to learn new things. I love that part of my job.”
As a leader, she tries to make sure those around her are recognized for their work. In her experience, “everything is better when people have the opportunity to do amazing work and be appreciated for it.”
“Historically, there was this idea that the worker is there to serve the company, but the company also serves its workers too,” Gjestvang said. “Being able to do meaningful work and be appreciated for that work and to grow in the process… is really important to people.
Working within a learning environment is something Gjestvang has done throughout her career. After working as a network consultant for the gallery in New York, she moved to Columbus, where her wife lived, to work as an educator at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her role included teaching documentary film and audio production to youth in the area. She founded the Columbus Jewish Film Festival shortly after her move, and also directed a film, “20 Straws: Growing Up Gay,” which featured LGBTQ students’ coming out and staying out stories.
Gjestvang spent the majority of her career at the Ohio State University, where she said she got to “grow in a lot of ways and do some really fun and exciting projects” over the fifteen years she was employed there.
“I did not think I was going to stay that long, but there kept being new opportunities to learn,” she said.
Following her time at OSU, she worked for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a leader for an executive and community engagement team, which covered the worldwide, public sector, and higher education divisions to address challenges that institutions face.
“I’d been in the same environment for a long time and realized just how motivated I am by learning and being in a new environment.”
She eventually left that job to work at Denison, but before she did, she had apprehension about the CIO role.
“I probably am on record somewhere saying I would never want to be a CIO because I think, especially when I was a little bit younger, I heard people who are in these tech leadership jobs who deal with security breaches, and get called in the middle of the night when stuff breaks,” Gjestvang said.
Yet the job posting for the role at Denison stood out to her because she said, “it focused on strategy, vision, relationships and trust building.”
She hasn’t avoided late-night calls, however. Sometimes she’ll be called after working hours to address a school-wide technological problem that demands urgency.
“In those moments, the best thing that you can do is create a really productive, safe and engaging context for people to push through,” Gjestvang said.
When she leads her team through these processes, she also said that she doesn’t think it’s effective to “barrel through” but rather build an alliance while also stressing urgency while holding people accountable. She also said that means that most typically this means holding technological vendors accountable rather than her coworkers.
She also makes sure to hold herself and those around her to high, but not unreasonable, standards.
“I do feel like there’s sometimes a standard of what feels like an external pressure to be really good at so many different parts of your life,” Gjestvang said. “It’s taken me a long time, but I definitely have found that balancing a lot of different roles that matter a lot to me is unrealistic to deliver at a high standard all at the same time.”
One part of her life that she also said is very important to her is being a mother. Balancing her work-life standards while also making time for them is a constant tightrope she walks.
“I want to take my kids to school in the morning, not every day, but some of the days… I want to be there for the real connections in my family,” Gjestvang said. “But I’ve had to recognize that there are certain places in your life where I’ve had to let myself drop the bar so that I can excel in the things that matter most.”
One of the most demanding times, according to her in terms of balance, was when she was a surrogate mother for another couple she was friends with. She had originally gotten the idea after watching an HBO documentary called “Paternal Instinct,” and said that “it was touching to me to see” someone else have a family.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be so cool to do that, to give to someone that gift,” Gjestvang said.
She made the decision to become a surrogate mother after she had her first two children, who were 2 and 4 at the time, creating a hectic home life for her and her wife. She humorously lamented the ease of the family she was being the surrogate for.
“I was pregnant, just exhausted with baby number three, and two little kids, while these two guys are off living their best life in Europe, just waiting for the baby to show up.”
Nevertheless, she described it as “an amazing experience,” even through the hardship. She also went through an unexpected grieving period, however when she gave up the child 10 days after giving birth.
“I never felt like he was really mine,” Gjestvang said. “I didn’t want to have another kid. But to birth the baby and give him away… it was intense.”
Despite this, she was really happy to give the family the child.
“Some of the most meaningful things you do in your life are incredibly hard,” Gjestvang said. “Climbing Mount Everest is probably amazing, but it’s freaking hard.”
Gjestvang also said that setting realistic standards for yourself is important. She said that she thinks social media and the visibility it gives into other people’s lives can often put more pressure on people since you’re more likely to just be seeing the high points of other people’s lives.
In her role as CIO, she finds that the strongest way to perform well is to use some of the values she has found in higher education.
“The sense of curiosity and persistence and engagement, communication, critical thinking have served me throughout my entire career,” Gjestvang said. “It’s part of what I love about being at Denison is it’s something you develop, you have this phenomenal opportunity to really deepen these really meaningful skills. Despite how much the world is changing, I don’t think that’s different.”