Goslins is the founding executive director of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream in Washington, D.C. She joined the organization in 2022 and lead it through its public opening in September 2025. It is part of the
Milken Institute. Prior to this, she was the Director of the Arts & Industries Building at the Smithsonian Institution. In that capacity she led the revitalization and reopening of the museum, closed to the public for over a decade. She served in this position for 6 years, major initiatives include the Long conversation series, the By The People arts and cultural festival, and the FUTURES exhibition, a pan-institutional 35,000 sq ft. exhibit that welcomed almost a million in-person and digital visitors in 9 months and received global media coverage. Before the Smithsonian, Goslins was the
executive director of the
President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, an advisory committee to the
White House on cultural policy. President Obama appointed her to this position in 2009. In this capacity, she worked closely with the White House, senior government officials, prominent artists, philanthropists and entrepreneurs and the country's cultural institutions to advance and support the arts and humanities in America and abroad. Under her management, the organization more than doubled its budget and programmatic activities, raised over $50M in public-private partnerships to support the arts, and launched several new initiatives, including Turnaround Arts, a partnership with the US Department of Education and the Ford Foundation to bring arts education to a group of the country's lowest-performing elementary schools, the National Student Poets Program, and a program with the
Smithsonian Institution, UNESCO and the U.S. Department of State to rescue and preserve Haitian cultural artifacts in the wake of the 2009 hurricane. She stepped down as executive director in 2015. It is the story of a "black woman at the
University of Alabama who runs for 2005
Homecoming Queen, going up against a century of ingrained
racial segregation, internal black politics, and
The Machine, a secret
coalition of traditionally
white fraternities and sororities formed in 1914. She has worked on productions for the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the
Discovery Channel, the
National Geographic Channel (Nat Geo), and
History, and was the director of the Independent Digital Distribution Lab, a joint PBS/ITVS project. Her most recent film was
Besa: The Promise, an award-winning feature documentary about
Albanian
Muslims who saved
Jews during World War II.
Law Prior to her arts career, Rachel was an international copyright attorney in the office of Policy and International Affairs in the U.S. Copyright Office, where she had responsibility for negotiating and drafting sections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and represented the Copyright Office at UNESCO, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization. She began her career as a litigator for the law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. In 2012 she was awarded a Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. ==Personal life==