Making a Space a Place: A Conversation with Marnie Mancuso

by DENISE WOLFE

Long before she ever set foot on a college campus, Marnie Mancuso was already designing environments. As a child, she says, she never played with Barbie dolls in the way most kids did. "They would never actually do anything," she recalls. Instead, she dressed them for imagined events and built out their homes using catalog clippings, backdrops, and whatever inspiration she could find, crafting entire storylines around the spaces they inhabited. It was an early sign of a lifelong instinct and Mancuso has always been drawn to the way a well-thought-out environment can shape an experience.

That instinct crystallized years later, in a very different way. As a sophomore at the University of Richmond, where she was actively involved in student life and student government, Mancuso remembers standing in the quad and taking in everything happening around her at once, from students studying on the lawn to a game of frisbee in motion to music drifting from the arts building to the crack of a bat against a ball on the baseball field. In that moment, she knew she belonged on a college campus. She wanted to be part of the fabric of student life itself, and she began charting a path toward that goal, eventually enrolling in law school with the long-term aim of becoming a dean of students.

Life had other plans for the timeline. Mancuso graduated from law school just as the economy collapsed, and rather than stepping directly into student affairs leadership, she took a part-time, live-in role as an assistant hall director in Campus Living at the University at Buffalo in the Governor’s Complex. She worked her way up from there, moving through a series of roles that increasingly exposed her to facilities and operations, eventually becoming a project manager overseeing residence halls and apartment complexes which covered furniture, painting, flooring, cleaning, appliance replacement, and every large-scale building project in between.

What grounded all of that work, she says, was never really about the buildings. It was her deep understanding of student development and residential learning curriculum, a connection she carried with her and that still shapes how she approaches her role today as UB Libraries' Facilities Planning and Management Officer. 

When Mancuso first walked into UB Libraries, she was struck by the sheer range of services offered to students and patrons. Her role, as she describes it, exists to make sure people can enjoy the library as an experience and not just use it as a resource.

"I make a space a place," she says, and it's a philosophy that runs through everything she does. Her hope is that students find in UB Libraries something like a second home: a place where they feel safe and comfortable enough to flourish, both academically and socially, throughout their time at UB.

The lawyer in her, though, is quick to point out that there's more at stake than comfort alone. Libraries are often the face of a university, she notes, drawing prospective students to campus and, by extension, supporting admissions. Students also spend enormous amounts of time in the library, building memories that stay with them long after graduation. Mancuso hopes that when today's students become tomorrow's donors, those memories of the Libraries and the spaces she helped shape will stay with them in a way that gives back to the university.

Over her seven years at UB Libraries, Mancuso has helped reshape some of its most visible spaces. Lockwood Memorial Library and Abbott Library she says, are unrecognizable compared to when she started. Of everything she's worked on, she counts the second floor of Silverman Library among her proudest achievements. Its central location has turned it into a launchpad for programming and connection across campus, and she considers it one of the clearest successes in how thoughtful use of space can bring people together.

Looking ahead, she's especially excited about the upcoming James Joyce Museum in Abbott Library, which she describes as a space designed to be visually stimulating, somewhere students can get lost in both beauty and content. For Mancuso, it represents not just a striking new addition to campus, but an honor to be able to offer students that kind of experience.

Outside of her work at the Libraries, Mancuso lives in Lewiston with her husband, two daughters, her father-in-law, and four dogs. That same childhood instinct for building out a dollhouse world, event by event and room by room, is still very much alive at home where she cooks, paints, gardens, refinishes furniture, and, true to form, curates every space she lives in.

More recently, Mancuso has taken on a new type of advocacy, a new and deeply meaningful role serving as an assigned counsel for children and other underserved clients in Niagara County. As an Attorney for the Child (AFC) she has worked on custody disputes, neglect proceedings, paternity matters, and grandparents' rights cases. Of all her work, she says juvenile delinquency cases resonate with her most. She describes the work as a chance to be a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves.  It’s a mission that, in its own way, echoes the same guiding value she's carried since that afternoon in the University of Richmond quad: showing up for the people who make up a community, and making sure they have a place where they can be supported and heard.

From a childhood spent building imaginary worlds, to a single moment on a college quad, to two decades spent shaping the physical and emotional landscape of student life, Marnie Mancuso's path has never really strayed from where it began. Whether she's transforming a library space or advocating for a child in court, her work has always come back to the same question: how do you make a place where someone can truly flourish?