Welcome, everyone to the Mona Lisa Monologues, Today’s Women Shaping History. I am Lisa Ross Faust, your host for this powerful new series. Our focus is, women who have broken the glass ceiling, have worked in a man’s world, or simply climbed their way to the very top, in any industry. Real stories, real-life conversations. It’s all about finding the masterpiece within.

Today we have Dee Patel joining us and she is the first female Managing Director of the iconic Hermitage Hotel in Nashville Tennessee. Everyone in Nashville knows Dee; she's been awarded the Woman of Influence by the Nashville Business Journal and the Outstanding Woman Hotelier of the Year. She’s also a stakeholder within her community and serves on several boards: The Tennessee Hospitality & Tourism Association, Historic Hotels of America, the Nashville Downtown Partnership, the Nashville Chapter of the Les Dames d’Escoffier International, which mentors and supports women in hospitality just to name a few and she is most proud of the hotel’s 10-year partnership with The Land Trust for Tennessee.

Dee recently took on an important role in organizing the Centennial Celebration of Women’s Suffrage in Nashville where it all happened 100 years ago. I bet you didn’t know Tennessee was the swing vote back then. Dee will give us a little history lesson, we’ll hear about the hotel, what they have been doing during this pandemic, of course, the women’s suffrage celebration and we’ll find out what it was like moving from England to Mississippi as a young girl, and how an independent Indian woman from the UK, figured out how to land a seat at the table. We’ll even get a little celebrity juice, some girls chat, and a very moving narrative of what she is teaching her children. She does it all, while at the helm of such a majestic property, and as far as I’m concerned – she is the queen.   A lady of distinction, let’s roll out the red carpet for Dee Patel….