She leads at the highest level in finance, yet her true signature lies in the moments she creates. As a C-Suite executive and the visionary behind Micro Mini Events, Ebony Burt has redefined what it means to host with intention. Specializing in elevated client activations, corporate experiences, and intimate gatherings, her work is designed for those who value access, ambiance, and authenticity. With every detail considered, she transforms ordinary spaces into curated experiences where connection is the true luxury.
You’ve built a powerful career at the executive level. What inspired you to step into hosting and curated events?
My corporate career gave me incredible access and extraordinary responsibility. I got to shape culture at scale and influence how millions of people experience their work lives. And I loved it. I still do. But there is something that happens in a beautifully designed, intimate space that a conference room or a town hall can never replicate. People exhale. They actually see each other. They connect in a way that changes them.
Micro Mini Events was born out of the notion that women like myself deserve to gather and be celebrated with the same intention they pour into everyone else.
How does your corporate background influence the way you design experiences?
Absolutely everything.
Spending years at the intersection of people strategy and organizational culture taught me that the environment you create is never neutral. It either opens people up or it shuts them down. The design of a space sends a message before a single word is spoken.
You focus on intimate gatherings, 10 to 20 people. What makes smaller rooms more powerful?
Because in a small room, you cannot hide, and you do not have to.
I spent years in large institutions watching people get lost in the crowd. The bigger the room, the easier it is to perform presence without actually showing up. Intimacy removes that option. And feeling seen makes people brave.
Some of the most transformative conversations I have ever witnessed happened over dinner tables, not in auditoriums. The right ten people in a beautifully held space can shift the trajectory of businesses, friendships, families, and careers. I have seen it happen. That is not small. That is everything.
What’s something most people don’t realize goes into creating a truly elevated event?
It is an emotional experience.
Most people think event design starts with a color palette or a Pinterest board. For me, it starts with a question. How do you want your guests to feel? Not what do you want them to see. That answer drives every single decision that follows. The florals, the fragrance, the music, the flow of the evening, the way the napkins are folded, all of it is in service of that feeling.
The other thing people underestimate is restraint. Elevated does not mean more. It means intentional. That discipline is hard. It requires confidence. But when you get it right, guests cannot always articulate why the evening felt so special. They just know it did. And that is the work.
You host in your own home. What made you open your space in that way?
I did not choose to be a hostess.
I was raised as one.
I just did not have the language for it until I was grown.
My mother and grandmother were the kind of women who kept the door open before anyone knocked. It was the place for holiday gatherings, birthdays, and Saturday night spades that went later than anyone planned. My grandmother always had food prepared. Always. Not because company was expected, but because in her world, people mattered enough to be ready for.
I watched that. I absorbed it in the way children absorb things before they know they are learning, through the smell of something on the stove, through the way a table was set with care even on an ordinary day, through the ease with which my grandmother welcomed a deacon or an usher board member who just dropped in. No fanfare. No apology for the house. Just come in, sit down, YOU ARE WELCOME HERE.
That is what I grew up knowing. Not event design, but welcome. Not tablescapes but belonging.
Opening my home as a professional hostess was not a business decision first. It was an inheritance. I am doing what the women before me did. I just finally understand the magnitude of what they were actually creating. They were not just feeding people. They were holding community together in their living rooms. They were making people feel like they mattered, one Saturday night at a time.
I host in my home because home is where I first learned that a space, when held with intention, can change how someone feels about themselves.
My grandmother knew that. She just never called it luxury.
I DO.
What does luxury mean to you right now?
Luxury is the moment someone walks into a room and realizes, for the first time or maybe the first time in a long time, that this was made for them.
I have spent my career making other people feel included. Luxury is finally being on the receiving end of that intention. It is someone else doing the thinking, the lifting, the designing so you can just arrive and exhale.
Luxury is access, but not physical access. It is the feeling of belonging somewhere you were told, explicitly or quietly, was not for you. It is sitting at a table that was designed with your presence in mind before you ever arrived.
Every tablescape, every gathered room, every intentional detail, it is an act of access. I am extending an invitation that says you deserve to be in beautiful spaces. You deserve to be celebrated in rooms that were built for you. Luxury is the audacity to take up the space you have always earned.
What is your personal reset after hosting or leading at such a high level?
I am going to be real with you. I am still figuring this out.
I wish I could give you the polished answer, the morning routine, the non-negotiable rest day, the wellness practice I never miss. But that would be performing a version of myself I have not fully become yet. One thing I have committed to is telling the truth about where I actually am.
Spending decades in the fast lane of the largest financial institutions in the world rewires you. The urgency becomes your baseline. The output becomes your identity. When you have operated at that pace for that long, you do not just off ramp. You have to learn how to want to.
That is where I am, learning how to want to slow down.
What I know is that stillness is where I do my best thinking. When I travel, really travel, not for work, something in me exhales in a way nothing else replicates.
So, my reset is still being written. Maybe that is the most honest thing I can say, that a woman who creates intentional space for everyone else is finally learning to create it for herself.
That is the work I am in right now, and I am not rushing it.
What is your favorite School Scents candle right now and why?
LEGACY. It is not even a question.
The name alone stops me. It does not ask permission to take up space.
I light Legacy when I am setting a table, when I am preparing a space, when I need to remember who I am and whose I am before guests arrive.
It is not just a candle. It is a ritual.
And Legacy gave it a name.
To find out more about Ebony and her company, Micro Mini Events follow her on Instagram @microminievents