Kim Sajet couldn't believe Americans would allow a Dutch-Australian to run the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.
But it doesn't really come up much.
Sajet was born in Nigeria to Dutch parents and moved to Victoria's Mornington Peninsula at the age of three.
After starting as the gallery's director last April, she is approaching her one-year anniversary in the top job.
Sajet remembers her reaction when a search company told her she would be perfect for the role.
"I said `are you out of your mind?'" she says.
"I said there was absolutely no way that they're going to appoint a non-American to that job.
"I really thought at some point somebody would bring it up but nobody did."
Sajet says during two decades in the US she has at times toned down her tendency to call a problem as she sees it immediately, which she views as one of her Australian qualities.
"We are all terribly nice to each other but then it really is about the side conversation later on or the backroom conversation.
"As a Dutch-Australian, because the Dutch are pretty practical as well, you know, I have very much a very open sort of `here's what I see the problem is and let's deal with it'.
"That I realise can be very disarming and I've had to dial it back a little bit sometimes, certainly in the early years.
"But I have a pretty no nonsense approach."
Sajet was the director of corporate development at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, between 1998 and 2001.
"I had a Bruegel (Dutch Renaissance painter in the 1500s) on my wall and being Dutch, my mother at that point I think she thought I'd finally made something of my life," she says, laughing.
Sajet headed what are now known as the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and Monash Gallery of Art before moving to Philadelphia in 1996.
She visits family and friends in Australia every few years and stopped by the National Gallery of Victoria's Melbourne Now exhibition last Christmas.
"Australians are very good at contemporary art, contemporary context and they are very good at the ideas part of things," she says.
She hopes to collaborate with other portrait galleries around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, which was the first institution outside the US to show Elvis at 21 from the Smithsonian.
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is currently showing American Cool, featuring 100 photographs of cultural icons.
Deborah Harry, lead singer of the American punk rock band, was the ultimate in cool when Sajet was growing up in Australia.
"I remember singing Atomic at the top of my lungs," she says.
Other names on the cool list photographed by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Annie Leibovitz include Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain, Madonna and Steve Jobs.
"There really isn't anybody that I hadn't heard of before growing up in Australia," Sajet says.
* American Cool runs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery until September 7, 2014.
