Janna Emmel has always paid attention to her dreams. In 1994 she awoke one morning in her house in Dana Point, California after a dream about the Black Hills. After she told her husband Randy Berger, he said, “I guess we better go.”

For Janna and Randy, the visit became a relocation. They bought a 700-square foot cabin on an acre of land near Hill City for $42,000 – a price that seemed incredibly low compared to Southern California real estate prices. And for awhile Janna was happy to “hang out in my house in the woods, and unwind from the California pace.” But when the euphoria of inspiration and impulse began to wear off, the couple realized that their employment opportunities in the Hills were not what they had hoped.

Sioux Falls natives, Janna and Randy had met and married in the 1980s. She was an Augustana graduate with a degree in Social Work and Sociology; he was a carpenter. In Sioux Falls winter weather often affected his ability to get work, so they decided to move to California. He became a master craftsman, doing high-end woodwork for expensive homes in coastal communities like Laguna Beach and the Newport Coast.  Janna went looking for work. The job she found challenged her intellect, provided an outlet for her creativity and eventually offered her a path to the untethered world of New Pioneers. But it started as a simple typing position.

Registered with a temporary employment agency, Janna was sent one day to the offices of a Laguna Beach-based film production company that needed someone to type a script. MacGillivray Freeman Films had pioneered the development of spectacular IMAX films like TO FLY, which debuted with the opening of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1976. By 1987, it was involved in a variety of exciting projects.

Over the next seven years, Janna’s work with MacGillivray Freeman expanded from typist to producer’s assistant to researcher to premiere planner. She worked on dramatic films about the nature of time, sailing and the wind, the performance limits of the human body, the cultures of Indonesia, life on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and the wonders of the world ocean.. It was exotic work. She collaborated with smart, creative people from all over the world.  “Essentially, I got paid to learn,” she adds, “it doesn’t get better than that.”   Nevertheless, she and Randy never imagined that they would live the rest of their lives in California.

“We always knew we were coming back,” she says. But there was no plan, just a dream. When they moved to Hill City, she said goodbye to her colleagues in California. Randy imagined that he would be able to do the same kind of carpentry in the Black Hills that he had been doing in Southern California, but as it turned out, there was no market for his high-end work.

Initially, the lack of work was tempered by the excitement of being home. “We have a big family” Janna says, “and we had lots of visitors, including friends and relatives from Sioux Falls and Minneapolis.” Janna set up a little desk in the cabin and Randy had a work bench. But after a 3-month hiatus and a couple of job interviews, Janna made a call to California.

“I asked my old boss if there was anything I could do from South Dakota,” she says. Soon she was researching, working with scriptwriters and collaborating remotely from her little cabin in the Hills. Three or four times a year she flew to Southern California for meetings, production work, or – best of all – film premieres. Eventually Janna used her Social Work skills to help the company establish a non-profit foundation for which she is now Director of Development and Programming.  As her work expanded, Janna even employed a local writer, Kristin Donnan-Standard, as a researcher and collaborator. Kristin, who spent part of her childhood in the Black Hills, had worked in television in L.A. and New York.  She understood the world of scripts and production.

Meanwhile, Randy began designing custom frames for artwork, experimenting with his own concept that blended woodworking with leather. They began selling the frames at art shows around the region and discovered a strong market for Randy’s designs. In 1997 Janna and Randy opened Warrior’s Work, a Main Street art gallery in Hill City.

With a business in town Janna and Randy became more socially connected and increasingly involved in economic development and the arts. Some long-time members of the community didn’t know what to make of Janna and the work she does on IMAX films. “People make the assumption that she is not like them,” says Kristin, “because what she does is not in their realm of experience. They think she has some magic skill and all these connections with famous people.” Janna laughs, reminding us her work is on educational documentaries and the film premieres are most often in museums!

Together Janna and Kristin have worked with others to promote the arts and make Hill City a destination for visitors to the Black Hills. They have asserted that the community’s future lies in attracting the kind of people that writer Richard Florida calls “cultural creatives.” Some of these efforts, including a new sign ordinance, sparked friction in the community between newcomers and long-time residents. But other projects, such as the commissioning of a sculpture of a buffalo – THE PATRIARCH – for the entrance to downtown have fostered cooperation.

“People came together,” Janna says, “to raise the money for that sculpture, arts people and business people, long-time residents and new.”

These efforts to position Hill City as a cultural center have begun to pay dividends. Business investment in the community is rising. Last year, the NEW YORK TIMES featured Hill City as a good place to retire to. For prospective retirees, cultural creatives and others, THE PATRIARCH symbolizes the confluence of the past, present and future of the community. It represents the natural history of the region, and it reflects the promise of creative minds like Janna Emmel, Randy Berger and Kristin Donnan-Standard.