Our Bloggers

Adrian Ellis became Executive Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center on October 1, 2007. Adrian comes to the not-for-profit arts organization at a pivotal time in its 21-year history: he had recently completed a major project with Jazz at Lincoln Center's Board and senior management, creating a new strategic plan for Jazz at Lincoln Center with his company, AEA Consulting, a company that specializes in strategic, operational and facilities planning for the cultural sector, which he founded in 1990. Between 1986 and 1990, Adrian was Executive Director of The Conran Foundation. Between 1981 and 1986, he was a civil servant in the UK Treasury and the Cabinet Office and from 1980 to 1982 was a College Lecturer in Politics at University College, Oxford. He has lived in New York since 1998.

Alan Brown principal of WolfBrown, is a leading researcher and management consultant in the nonprofit arts industry. He has studied audiences, visitors and patterns of cultural participation in almost every major market in the U.S. His work focuses on understanding consumer demand for cultural experiences and on helping cultural institutions, foundations and agencies to see new opportunities, make informed decisions and respond to changing conditions. He has authored numerous articles and reports on audience behaviors, trends in cultural participation, engagement practices and the value system surrounding arts activities, and speaks frequently at national and international conferences.

Andras Szanto is a writer, researcher, and consultant whose work spans the worlds of art, media, policy, and cultural affairs. He is a member of the senior faculty of the Sotheby's Institute of Art and director of the NEA Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University. The former head of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia, he has designed conferences, conducted research, and launched initiatives for major foundations and cultural organizations. He is co-author and editor of five books, and his reporting and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, The Art Newspaper, and other newspapers and periodicals. He is a founder of the online arts publication Artworldsalon and has edited the journals ARTicles and Reflections. Born in Budapest, he lives in New York City.

Andrew Taylor is Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration (www.bolzcenter.org), an MBA degree program and research center in the Wisconsin School of Business. An author, lecturer, and researcher on a broad range of arts management issues, Andrew has also served as a consultant to arts organizations and cultural initiatives throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the International Society for the Performing Arts, American Ballet Theatre, the Center for Arts and Culture, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Closer to home, he helped develop the budget pro forma and operating plan for the $205-million Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin. Andrew is currently the president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (www.artsadministration.org), an international association of degree-granting programs in arts and cultural management, research, and policy, and is a consulting editor for The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. Since July 2003, he has written a popular weblog on the business of arts and culture, "The Artful Manager," hosted by ArtsJournal.com (www.artfulmanager.com).

Bau Graves is Executive Director of the Old Town School of Folk Music, in Chicago, Illinois. His work is focused on exploration of the personal, political, aesthetic and ethical issues embedded in the concept and practice of public culture. He is the past Director of the Jefferson Center Foundation, in Roanoke, Virginia, and co-founder of the Center for Cultural Exchange in Maine, where he facilitated the creation of an extended series of programs, in close collaboration with community groups and artists, addressing grass roots cultural aspirations, questions of identity and social/financial power relations. Bau's work as a field researcher, arts presenter, community organizer, project manager and tour director has been prolific, winning numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Foundation, Americans for the Arts' Animating Democracy program, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many others. Bau has performed and recorded with several jazz and traditional music ensembles, and composed original scores for two collaborative projects with dancer/director Ann Carlson. He holds a Masters degree in ethnomusicology from Tufts University, has published essays concerning cultural issues in both the academic and popular press, and has appeared on and/or produced numerous recordings. Bau Graves' first book, Cultural Democracy, was published in 2005 by the University of Illinois Press.

Bill Ivey was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998 through 2001, was director of the Country Music Foundation from 1971 to 1998, and was twice elected Chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He presently serves as founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

Douglas McLennan is an arts journal and the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.

Ellen Lovell has been the president of Marlboro College since 2004. A graduate of Bennington College, McCullouch-Lovell served as Chief of Staff to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy for ten years. Under the Clinton administration, she worked as executive director of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, deputy chief of staff to the First Lady, and deputy assistant to the President and advisor to the First Lady on the Millennium Project.

James Early is the Director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Since 1984, Mr. Early has served in many positions at the Smithsonian Institution: Assistant Provost for Educational and Cultural Programs, Assistant Secretary for Education and Public Service, , and Interim Director of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum (Prototype of the American Neighborhood Museum).

Jim Smith

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde is currently at work on a book about our "cultural commons," that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Marian Godfrey has an extensive background in nonprofit arts management, production, administration, fund raising, strategic planning and grantmaking. Currently the senior director of Culture Initiatives at The Pew Charitable Trusts, Marian oversees programs that support the arts and heritage in Philadelphia and special civic projects that benefit the region and the nation at large. Prior to arriving at Pew in 1989, Ms. Godfrey has worked for such organizations as Mabou Mines, Dance Theater Workshop, and La Jolla Playhouse. She produced film and video projects, including the feature-length film, "Dead End Kids: A Story of Nuclear Power," which aired on public television nationwide.

Martha Bayles's work-in-progress, tentatively titled America's Cultural Footprint, will be published by Yale University Press in 2011.  She contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal, Wilson Quarterly, Washington Post, Weekly Standard, and other publications.  Her books include Hole In Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (University of Chicago); and Ain't It a Shame? Censorship and the Culture of Transgression (University of London). She blogs at World Affairs ("Hearts and Minds") and at ArtsJournal.com ("Serious Popcorn").  Ms. Bayles has been a Fulbright lecturer at Marie Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland; and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.  Currently she is a Lecturer in the Arts & Sciences Honors Program at Boston College.;

Nihar Patel

Russell Taylor, President and CEO of National Arts Strategies since January 2001, has extensive senior experience in strategic business planning, financial analysis and planning, and all areas of operational management. Educated in England and America, she served as director of development for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art before returning to England in 1985 at the invitation of the English National Opera (ENO) to establish the Company's first fund-raising department. During this time, she also lectured extensively at graduate programs of arts and business management throughout Britain. From 1997 through 2000, she rejoined the ENO as executive director.

Sam JonesIn early 2010, Sam began a Policy Fellowship jointly hosted by the UK think tank, Demos, and the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport . Over the past five years, his research at Demos has covered culture, the arts and international and intercultural communication. His most recent publication, Expressive Lives, featuring and building from Bill Ivey's thesis, argues that our choices in culture and creativity help us find our place in the world and explore who we are and who we want to be. Currently, he is engaged on a study of the organisational development of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a project looking at current uses and care of the heritage infrastructure of the public realm. He has written on Cultural Diplomacy and, elsewhere, on the importance of creativity and visual development in young people's education. In November 2008, his pamphlet It's a Material World drew attention to the importance of conservation and caring for the material symbols of the public realm. In other work, Sam has published a study into the future the English language and its implications for policy-makers, and pamphlets about the role of conversation in the modern world and trust in local government. Sam has also worked with the BBC to investigate TV arts audiences. He has a double first in History from Cambridge and an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Steven Tepper, associate director, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, has served as consultant to numerous institutions including the National Humanities Center, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and many foundations. He has published articles on the sociology of art, cultural policy and democracy in journals including Review of Policy Research, Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society and International Journal of Cultural Policy. He is working on a book that tracks hundreds of case studies of struggles over art, education and culture in 75 American cities.

William James