How a Music Teacher Became CFO of the Peabody Essex Museum

SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS – Call him the maestro of numbers.

It was around two decades ago that Daniel Draper decided that he wanted a change from his day job as an elementary school music teacher where he helped children turn a racket of drums, clarinets and trumpets into melodies.

He was good at this work. He loved having art in his life. But it wasn’t his calling.

As a classically trained vocalist, he could have pursued a singing career. He once sang the part of Marcello, the painter, in a production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème.

Instead, Draper turned to numbers. He entered Northeastern University’s graduate school in 2008, where he completed accounting and business degrees, and spent almost 20 years analyzing balance sheets.

The experience added up. Last month he was named chief financial officer, or CFO, of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Founded in 1799 to display artifacts found by globetrotting seafarers, it’s the oldest, continuing operating museum in the U.S., according to the museum’s website. Its exhibits draw about 250,000 visitors a year.

Draper’s job is to help manage the institution’s $700 million in assets.

“Knowing where your resources are coming from and how they’re being spent is basically the long and short of my job,” said Draper.

Daniel Draper, the new CFO of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, contemplates an art work called “All the Flowers are for Me” by Anila Quayyum Agha. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.

The Wenham, Massachusetts resident explained that with his shift to accounting, he found continuity between his love of music and love of numbers. Both are communication tools.

“Balance sheets can speak in harmony…There are patterns in both, whether it’s stanzas and intervals or budgeting and forecasting” he said. “It’s communicating that to an audience, even if that’s a client.”

Draper chose Northeastern for its reputation and hands-on co-op program. It was the right choice, he explained, though he found it daunting at first.

“I felt I was light years behind,” he recalled. “I remember when I took my first accounting class and looked around, almost everyone had at least some accounting history. Everyone was speaking this language that I couldn’t.”

So he stayed up late almost every night studying to understand the basics, he said. He credited one professor, Timothy Rupert, who had a preacher-like call-and-response style of teaching, for keeping him on his toes.

“He was patient, and everything clicked,” Draper explained.

A long, dark saw-like specimen lined on both sides with pale, pointed teeth, mounted vertically against a white gallery wall. — 10/01/26 – SALEM, MA. – Daniel Draper, CFO of the Peabody Essex Museum, poses for photos at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, on Oct. 1, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.

A man in a navy blazer reaches toward a gilt-framed black-and-white engraving of a figure rising through clouds surrounded by angels. — 10/01/26 – SALEM, MA. – Daniel Draper, CFO of the Peabody Essex Museum, poses for photos at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, on Oct. 1, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.

He turned into a stand-out student, said Rupert, an accounting professor at Northeastern’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business told Northeastern Global News.

“I have not followed his career, but I am not surprised at how well he has done,” Rupert said. He recalled Draper being good at collaborating with other students in his class.

“They became their own little family at Northeastern,” Rupert said.

Eventually, Draper landed a co-op at the accounting firm Mayer Hoffman McCann in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He worked the backroom jobs of filing papers and taking reports from accountants out in the field. He graduated with an MS and MBA in 15-months taking his first job at Mayer Hoffman McCann.

He stayed close to the arts. After working a few years at accounting firms, he became a financial controller at the Boston Ballet, where he sometimes watched rehearsals during work breaks.

Around eight years ago, he landed his first accounting job at the Peabody Essex Museum, and he quickly rose through the ranks.

It was at Northeastern that Draper said he learned that what keeps a good CFO up at night is knowing where your money is coming from and where it’s going.

There’s a lot for Draper to do in his new role, said his boss, Kurt Steinberg, who is the acting executive director and CEO of the museum.

“He helps make the financial glue that keeps this place running,” Steinberg said

Draper oversees the annual audit that helps the museum keep its nonprofit status. He also tracks 240 separate funds and endowments and payroll for more than 250 employees.

When Draper gets a few rare minutes to himself, he sometimes walks to the museum’s oldest gallery, the East India Marine Hall. There he contemplates the relics of a world gone by. There are warrior spears from Fiji and New Zealand, centuries-old wooden figureheads from the bows of sailing ships, and a 13-foot-long, 400-pound jawbone from a sperm whale’s skull.

But his favorite place is the two-story atrium, he said, because it reminds him of the big halls where he occasionally sings with a chamber choir.

“From a choral perspective, I love it,” he said. “The way it was engineered, it’s a sound bubble. Voices can go up and hang around in the rafters for a while.”