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Sara Mirski, 38
Managing Director of Development
Boymelgreen Developers
It took Sara Mirski time to find her true calling. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a degree in studio art and art history, she veered into social services, counseling clients by day as she renovated her 1920s Minneapolis bungalow by night.
After her refurbished home netted an award from Better Homes and Gardens in 1997, Ms. Mirski landed a job with one of Minnesota's leading developers and, voil‡, a career was born.
Next stop: New York City. After completing a graduate development program at New York University with a 4.0 grade-point average, Ms. Mirski joined Brooklyn-based Boymelgreen in 2003. Though she had offers from much larger firms, she liked the company's entrepreneurial edge. President Shaya Boymelgreen immediately put her to the test at 88 Leonard St., a new luxury rental property in TriBeCa. "Sara is good at both the small items and the big picture," he says.
Today, as a managing director at Boymelgreen, Ms. Mirski is one of a handful of female developers in the city. But her teams of 20 to 30 engineers, architects, construction managers and planners--frequently all men--are happy to follow her lead.
"Men are more open and less defensive with a woman," she says.
Ms. Mirski is supervising five residential projects in the city, but she is increasingly focused on Houston, where she's overseeing two mixed-use ventures worth $1 billion. "I started out with a house and ended up with Texas," says Ms. Mirski, who travels to the Lone Star State twice a month.
Despite her hectic schedule, Ms. Mirski finds time for hobbies such as kayaking, watercolor painting and yoga.
"I have found balance, finally," she says. "But it has taken a long time."