David Mees is a restless man. For more than two decades he has worked for the U.S. government as a cultural attaché, packing his suitcases every few years and moving from one country to another--Tanzania, Tunisia, Iceland, the former Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Jordan, and, since last summer, Italy. He witnessed the advent of civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and was the last U.S. diplomat to work in pre-war Sarajevo. He's driven along the Dalmatian Coast, into the Swat Valley, and through the dusty back alleys of Peshawar.

A cultural attaché is, essentially, a connector--of countries, people, and ideas. Mees's current job at the American embassy in Rome is to promote dialogue and interaction between the U.S. and Italy. He interviews and selects American and Italian scholars who are seeking Fulbright fellowships. He helps produce events and outreach programs, such as an exhibition of Edward Mapplethorpe photographs, a lecture on diversity by the American actor and lawyer Hill Harper, and a workshop on blogging for Muslim Italians. He also works with the 135 American colleges and universities that sponsor study-abroad programs in Italy. It's all about "bringing people together and playing that liaison role," Mees says.

Mees inherited a life of international travel from his Protestant missionary parents. Born in the Netherlands, he traveled at the age of three months by boat to Argentina, where his father taught in a bible school. "I remember puffing black steam locomotives, as well as one night when my father woke me up on a beach in Uruguay and showed me a magical scene of fireflies," Mees says. "You could say that's when I caught the bug of restlessness."

Mees focused on photography at the Museum School, earned a master's in international relations at Johns Hopkins University, and found one the few careers that combines the two fields. "Most of my daily work is administrative," he says, "but my Museum School background helps because I'm always interacting with architects, dancers, writers, scientists, entrepreneurscreative people." Mees still takes photographs, and showed a collection of them in Amman, where he was posted before Italy. But he is not "irrepressible" as an artist, he says. "I'm not one of those people who has to be creating" all the time.

Mees is sometimes wistful about his role as a facilitator of art instead of a maker. Once, while working in Sarajevo, he organized a concert by an American guitarist, and as he sat in the audience, he says, "I was feeling sorry for myself, looking at him and imagining how much satisfaction he gets by doing his art and enthralling a hall full of people." But then Mees realized that he was the person who made the concert happen. "I do regret not having time to use my hands and vision," he says. "Instead I use my judgment. It's just sometimes hard to know how to appreciate it."