Flying the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy with the stars of 'Avengers: Endgame' is just one of the perks of Walt Disney Imagineering construction manager Kristina Dewberry’s job at Disneyland.
Walt Disney Imagineering construction manager Kristina Dewberry got to fly the Millennium Falcon with Captain Marvel star Brie Larson and Ant-Man’s Paul Rudd on the Smugglers Run attraction in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland.
“It was amazing,” Dewberry said. “They were the pilots. I was a gunner.”
Dewberry is one of more than 70 Disney cast members featured in the new “One Day at Disney” docuseries on the Disney+ streaming service and the accompanying coffee table book. Her episode debuts on Feb. 14.
Flying the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy with the stars of “Avengers: Endgame” is just one of the perks of Dewberry’s job. But getting to that moment in the cockpit was as stress-inducing as any dogfight in the Millennium Falcon.
Larson and Rudd had just finished appearing at a media event in April at Disney California Adventure with other stars from “Avengers: Endgame” when Dewberry got the call that Captain Marvel and Ant-Man wanted to tour Galaxy’s Edge and ride the Smugglers Run flight simulator. The still-unfinished Star Wars land wouldn’t open for nearly two more months and the 14-acre site was still very much a bustling construction zone buzzing with hundreds of workers.
“I took every piece of safety equipment that I had from boots to long pants to anything that we had,” Dewberry said during an interview at Disneyland. “We basically set up a store right inside of the entry to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.”
Dewberry and her team helped outfit Larson and Rudd with boots, hard hats, safety glasses and neon vests so they could tour the new land with Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“How in the world did that even happen that day, but it did,” said Dewberry, 45, of Anaheim. “We made it happen.”
That summarizes Dewberry’s job in a nutshell: She makes it happen. Whether it’s construction logistics, worker safety or site security.
Her job as an Imagineering construction manager at Disneyland is to help coordinate the thousands of general contractors who work on job sites at the Anaheim theme park.
“I’m the boots-on-the-ground lady out in the field,” Dewberry said.
Dewberry helps turn Imagineering’s Blue Sky dreams into a brick-and-mortar reality. Her top priority: Make sure each project at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure is safe for everyone — from construction workers to theme park visitors.
“That is definitely going to be awesome, but we need to do this to make it work,” Dewberry often finds herself saying. “We can do all this stuff, but remember we have these requirements that we need to meet for security purposes or safety purposes so that everybody goes home safe at night.”
Turning construction dust into pixie dust on any Disney project involves bringing together three key components: Building facilities, show elements and ride systems.
“You have these three different components that are all very important in their own rights and you need to make sure that they all work together,” Dewberry said. “If you have show but no ride or if you have show and ride but no facility then nothing works. It’s that trifecta of all of those things together. That’s the cool part of my job is to be able to help those three parties communicate.”
Dewberry’s construction background makes her naturally closest to the facility side of the trifecta, but she’s becoming more familiar with the show and ride elements.
“I’m more facility construction because that’s my background, but I also understand creativity,” Dewberry said. “My boyfriend is an actor and a director. My daughter is a singer-songwriter. So I’m very familiar with that creative world. And the ride world I’m becoming a lot more involved in as well.”
Dewberry has worked on everything from the Disneyland Hotel renovation to the Pixar Pier makeover, but her biggest Disney project so far has been Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
“We were told, ‘Be the most innovative. Just really push all the boundaries,’” Dewberry said of Galaxy’s Edge. “To do that, we needed to bring people in from around the globe. So I got to work with some really awesome talent to be able to make that immersive world happen.”
She feels a sense of pride being part of the massive $1 billion Galaxy’s Edge project.
“We worked really hard for a really long time,” Dewberry said. “Being a Star Wars fan, I wanted it to be perfect.”
She watched a 14-acre mud hole become a spaceport on the outer rim of the Star Wars galaxy.
“It’s a great feeling,” Dewberry said. “It is dirt as far as you can see. Then all of a sudden we have these mountains and massive buildings where we have these ridiculously advanced technology systems for these ride systems.”
Now Dewberry is working on four Disneyland renovation projects at once: King Arthur Carrousel, Snow White’s Scary Adventures, Indiana Jones Adventure and Haunted Mansion. That’s all happening while a new themed land set to debut this summer is taking shape across the esplanade at Disney California Adventure: Avengers Campus. If that’s not enough, there’s another project taking shape in Mickey’s Toontown at Disneyland that is set to open in 2022: Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
“It’s a lot of balls in the air,” she said.
And Imagineering is always dreaming up the next new thing to add to the parks.
“If you look historically at Imagineering projects, the ideas start sometimes decades earlier than when the project actually happens,” Dewberry said.
Dewberry is a lifelong theme park fan and roller coaster enthusiast. She grew up in Cincinnati riding Kings Island’s 7,359-foot-long Beast, the world’s longest wooden coaster.
“The technology that it takes to be able to craft these amazing things, I find that very interesting,” Dewberry said.
While in Cincinnati, she served as the chapter president of the National Association for Women in Construction. Being a woman in the male-dominated construction industry has given Dewberry an opportunity to view projects from a different point of view.
“I definitely think it’s a different perspective,” she said. “Men and women tend to think a little differently on things. And it’s not even just men and women. It’s people of color.”
Diversity is a big reason Dewberry is at Disney.
“We don’t necessarily do that in the rest of the construction industry very well,” Dewberry said of diversity in her field. “We’re working on it. It’s definitely a goal. But it’s still a thing.”
Throughout her career, Dewberry has worked with men on construction jobs who wanted to treat her like their daughter, ask her out on A date or believed a job site was no place for a woman.
“Once you figure out what category those people are in you can pretty much figure out how to reach them and get to them,” Dewberry said. “Some of them you never do. But a lot of them, they’re like, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ There’s still lots of room for growth in diversity and inclusion.”
Dewberry hopes to inspire women and people of color to get into the construction field.
“If you have the passion, you can definitely do this,” she said. “This is not just for dudes. This is something that anybody with a little bit of common sense can really learn and figure out.”
Dewberry got her first tool belt when she was 10 years old. She learned carpentry and construction from her father, who taught her to build quality and stressed safety.
Dewberry often thinks of her father when she’s on a Disney job site: “How would my dad handle this?”
Working with her father as a kid helped persuade Dewberry to seek a career in the construction industry.
“To be able to build something with your own hands that was there for a year or 10 years or whatever, that was a really good feeling for me,” Dewberry said. “I was never going to be an office type of person. I would not be able to sit in an office for eight hours at a time. I love being out and about working with different types of people. So construction just really made sense.”
