THERE'S no disputing Jean Cameron's genuine and wide-ranging interest in culture. Her Twitter page alone is proof of that: 17,000 tweets in all, mostly about the arts, with the most recent ones covering everything from live music to fashion, Robert Burns to youth theatre.

Given this abiding interest, and given her lifelong background in the arts - she worked on Glasgow's Aye Write! literary festival, produced Scotland's exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennale and contributed to the international strand of Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games cultural programme - she was undoubtedly a sound choice as director of Paisley's bid to become the UK City of Culture in 2021.

There's one other good reason. She herself is from Paisley. She was raised in Tannahill Road, went to St Mirins and St Margaret's High. Her first time on a stage? That would have been when she was three, taking part in a dance display at Paisley Town Hall, just down the road from where she's meeting The Herald today, at the town's University of the West of Scotland (UWS) campus.

"When I left school at 17," she is saying, "there wasn’t an obvious place to pursue a career in culture or the creative industries," so she headed east, to Edinburgh, to do Italian and French with business studies.

It's a sign of the changing times in Paisley, "of UWS and West College Scotland, who also have a campus here, that there's such an array of creative industries and cultural arts courses now that weren’t here when I left school".

But at university her interests lay more in languages and rather less in business studies: "I guess I wanted to communicate and to help showcase, internationally, the best of what we have locally," she says. "I left because I didn’t like the business side and came back to Paisley and I worked in the arts centre and over that time got to know David Wallace and choreographed his pantomimes there. David now runs Pace, the UK’s largest youth theatre [former pupils include Paolo Nutini and James McAvoy].

"David also introduced me to the new BA community arts course at what was then Jordanhill College. I relished that commitment of socially-engaged arts practice together with that sense of having languages and using culture as a meeting point. This was around the time of Glasgow 1990, so you had really big, socially-engaged arts projects that were meaningful and relevant to local communities but still had an international ambition, like the cultural exchange between people in Castlemilk with people in Rostov on Don, one of Glasgow's twin cities.

I'm still very passionate about the intersections that happen between distinct cultures."

In time, Cameron, now 47, made her way into the thriving arts scene in Glasgow. "I worked at the CCA as performance programmer for a short while; I worked at [the arts company] New Moves; I was arts and performance programmer at The Arches for three years in a freelance capacity, up until 2005, and started up things there like the first circus school in Scotland for young people."

Over the years she became a well-known figure on the Scottish arts scene. She was the producer of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Eleven years ago she produced Selective Memory: Scotland & Venice, Scotland’s national presentation at the Biennale.

She served on the board of Edinburgh's street-arts company, Iron Oxide. In 2009 she was one of 35 international culture figures involved with the British Council’s year-long pilot Cultural Leadership International programme. "I get really excited by an idea," she says, "and am unencumbered by which particular art-form is the best medium for bringing it about".

When a friend texted her a link to the Paisley 2021 post, she applied and found herself caught up in "a very quick and rigorous recruitment process. That first day of interviews, there were five candidates. We each had four interviews, and there was also homework, and online psychometric testing. The next week there were three of us, and we toured Paisley's cultural venues and met people from the partnership boards involved in the bid."

She landed the job on the same day as she got the keys to her new Glasgow flat. "I really wanted this job," she says. "It's the first job I’ve had in Paisley since I started my career back in Paisley Arts Centre. I was determined to fight tooth and nail to get it, because it’s about Paisley and because it’s about culture. I kind of feel I've got a resident focus group, too, as my family are still here [her mother, who worked in the Ferguslie Mills, lives in the town; her father worked at the Chrysler/Talbot car factory at Linwood].

"From when I left school up until quite recently, I've felt that Paisley's sense of self had diminished, especially in culture. In 2014 the council published The Untold Story, when it set out plans to make the most of Paisley's heritage and cultural assets, acknowledging a regeneration that had culture at its heart and including a bid for UK City of Culture status."

She talks about the "step change" the 2021 bid can make in terms of economic, social and cultural regeneration, about the rich tapestry of grassroots activity that is already evident across the town, and Renfrewshire.

Speaking, generally, of mills and rich tapestries reminds you the internationally-known Paisley Pattern is at the heart of ambitious plans announced by the council, independent of the 2021 bid. Its museum will benefit from a £56.7 million transformation into a national showcase of textile and design by 2021; there will also be a £3.7m "world-class" museum store supporting the new museum.

As for the bid, says Cameron, "the DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport] hasn't announced a precise timescale but we've got this calendar year to prepare the bid and I imagine that February 2017 will be an official moment for us to declare an interest. That April we will submit our first bid and will hopefully be shortlisted to go through to the next process, which will last from May to September.

"The bid team has been mapping our cultural landscape and looking at the jewels in the cultural crown: what are the stories that make us distinct? We are pooling all that information together, then will have conversations with communities and businesses to ensure that the bid has a collective vision."

In terms of local reaction, she says: "I haven't had that, 'aye, right' sort of reaction: there's a sense of intrigue, curiosity, and a great expectation this could be great."

As an example of this she smiles as she recalls the high-profile bid launch last November, at the town's 850-year old Abbey: "It was a packed, amazing event, and right at the end Tony Lawler, who beats the drum at the Sma' Shot workers' festival, stood up in the back row of the Abbey and said, 'I'll beat my drums for you'. There's a real sense of momentum, of coming together. Ultimately, the bid is about the people of Paisley."

St Mirren, the local team, has renamed its ground the Paisley 2021 Stadium, in a two-year sponsorship deal. And Paisley has no shortage of locally-born cultural figures, whom Cameron would love to get involved in the campaign: John Byrne, Gerard Butler ("I went to school with him and it would be great to get him involved"), Paulo Nutini, David Tennant, Steven Moffat.

There are great stories involving women, too: artists Claire Barclay and Anya Gallaccio, and Amanda Gaughan, associate artist at the Lyceum Theatre. "We absolutely want to bring that constituency in at some point," Cameron says. The internationally-acclaimed sculptor Sandy Stoddart, Edinburgh-born and Renfrewshire-raised, has studios downstairs from where we are speaking at UWS Paisley. It's an impressive list, however you look at it.

Win or lose, Paisley should benefit from the bid process, she says. "We're in it to win it, as the saying goes but the bid has been a powerful hook for people. There's a sense of 'we can do this' ... There is a sense of a swagger evident already."

In an interview 16 years ago, The Herald noted her "irrepressibly sunny disposition". You can only imagine what it would be like were Paisley to actually win.