2026 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient: Jennifer "Jen" Marangelo
Jen Dacy Marangelo has spent much of her life helping people see what they have overlooked. As founder and executive director of the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium, she has turned a lifelong curiosity about the natural world into a one-of-a-kind science museum that invites visitors of all ages to look closely at the small creatures that keep ecosystems running.
Marangelo’s route to Missoula began far from the Rocky Mountains. Born in Illinois and raised in Alabama, she was not the archetypal outdoor kid. Nature, as she recalls, was distant—something she had not yet been invited to explore. That changed when she took a position as ecology director at a camp north of Spokane, Washington, introducing Boy Scouts to the plants and animals around them. The experience pushed her to start a new path, one that would bring her west and into a new relationship with science and the outdoors.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology and human development from the University of Alabama, Marangelo came to the University of Montana specifically for its wildlife biology program, arriving sight unseen in Missoula more than 30 years ago. She found exactly what she was looking for: a demanding, high-quality program and a community she wanted to call home. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Biology in 1998, and the University quickly became the anchor for her professional and intellectual life.
As an undergraduate, Marangelo began working in the UM Division of Biological Sciences, eventually becoming lab manager in Professor Doug Emlen’s research group. Emlen’s work focused on insects—especially dung beetles—and Marangelo, who had entered wildlife biology more interested in birds and plants, found herself drawn into an entirely new world. Insects, she realized, were endlessly diverse and scientifically rich.
“You’ll never be bored again if you like insects,” she has said.
Working with Emlen introduced Marangelo not only to insect biology but also to education. Schools and teachers called frequently, asking the lab to bring animals into classrooms or to lead students outdoors to go look at bugs. Those visits revealed the power of live animals as teaching tools: unusual arthropods could replace fear with fascination and turn an ecology lesson into an experience that students remembered. Bugs, Marangelo discovered, were great teaching assistants and they could be the foundation of something larger.
A visit to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and its immersive butterfly house, provided the spark. Standing in the warm, humid air, surrounded by free-flying butterflies and stunned onlookers, Marangelo saw how a single, sensory-rich exhibit could act as a gateway into deeper learning. If a tropical butterfly house could move visitors so profoundly in a major city, she thought, perhaps Missoula could embrace something similar. That gateway bug idea became the kernel of the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium.
To turn that dream into reality, Marangelo knew she needed more than passion; she needed training in museum work and curriculum design. She returned to UM to pursue an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Museum Exhibit Design and Curriculum Development, graduating in 2008. The interdisciplinary program required her to build her own course of study and committee, drawing on resources such as the Phil Wright Zoological Museum, American Zoo and Aquarium Association coursework in exhibit design, and teaching experience in UM’s entomology courses. It was, in her words, “a great learning experience all in itself,” and it provided the intellectual and practical foundation for the museum she hoped to build.
In 2009, immediately after completing her master’s degree, Marangelo founded the nonprofit that would become the Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium. At first, it had no building, no staff and no endowment—only a young organization, a menagerie of invertebrates and a big vision. Over the next several years she bootstrapped her way forward, launching the downtown Missoula Insectarium in 2015 as a 1,000‑square‑foot USDA containment facility with live arthropods and a small butterfly box, and then using that first phase as proof of concept. Field trips, birthday parties and outreach programs brought thousands of children and families into contact with insects.
When that initial lease ended in 2019, Marangelo and her team temporarily housed their permitted animals on the UM campus and ran programs out of partner organizations such as the Montana Natural History Center, even as they embarked on an ambitious capital campaign. The path was not easy. The project survived facility moves, partnership negotiations, a complex public‑private collaboration with Missoula County, and the challenges of raising millions of dollars during the COVID‑19 pandemic. Through it all, Marangelo persisted, building credibility one conversation, school visit and donor meeting at a time.
By 2023, that long effort had paid off. The Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium opened its doors at the Missoula County Fairgrounds, a $4.6 million museum and tropical butterfly house that has quickly become a Midtown landmark. The approximately 9,000‑square‑foot facility houses a year‑round, climate‑controlled butterfly habitat with 500 free‑flying butterflies from 25–30 species, as well as exhibits featuring insects, spiders, crustaceans, millipedes and centipedes. It is a USDA‑regulated containment facility—one of the only institutions of its kind in the region—and relies on weekly shipments of hundreds of chrysalides from around the world to keep the exhibit vibrant.
The Butterfly House and Insectarium is also intertwined with the University of Montana. Marangelo’s board and advisory committees include UM faculty and alumni; nearly half of the staff and many of the 50 plus volunteers are UM graduates, students or former faculty and staff; and the museum regularly collaborates with UM scientists on outreach and exhibit development. In 2024, the Missoula Midtown Association named the Butterfly House the Best Nonprofit in Midtown, and local readers voted it both Best Place for Kids and Best New Business, reflecting the community’s embrace of Marangelo’s vision.
Under Marangelo’s leadership, the Butterfly House and Insectarium now welcomes tens of thousands of visitors annually— over 82,000 in 2024 alone—through general admission and programs ranging from K–12 field trips and “Bugs on the Move” classroom visits to summer camps, adult lecture series such as “Bugs and Brews,” sensory hours, family programs and the inventive “Bug Appetit” dinner, where participants sample gourmet dishes featuring edible insects.
Throughout this work, Marangelo has maintained a clear focus: to help people appreciate insects for both their ecological importance and their sheer wonder. She hopes visitors leave the Butterfly House not only with a memory of a dazzling butterfly or a giant millipede, but also with a desire to notice and protect the smaller creatures in their own backyards—and to see science as something accessible, human and inviting. In doing so, she has not only created a new institution for Missoula, but also opened a path for future scientists, especially young girls, to imagine themselves in the field she once thought was beyond her reach.