Executive Director, ArtPlace America

Jamie Bennett has been the Executive Director of ArtPlace America since January 2014. Previously, Jamie served as Chief of Staff at the National Endowment for the Arts and Chief of Staff at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.  He has also provided strategic counsel at the Agnes Gund Foundation; served as chief of staff to the President of Columbia University; and worked in fundraising at The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Philharmonic, and Columbia College.  His past nonprofit affiliations have included the Board of Directors of Art21 and the HERE Arts Center; the Foot-in-the-Door Committee of the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation; and Studio in a School’s Associates Committee.  Jamie received his B.A. from Columbia College in New York City.

President, New Hampshire Institute of Art

Kent Devereaux is the President of the New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA), a private, nonprofit, college of arts and design located in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Before assuming the presidency of NHIA, Kent served as Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Cornish College of the Arts. Prior academic affiliations include appointments as a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), as the Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor in Criticism at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and as a Fulbright Fellow at the national arts academy in Surakarta, Java, Indonesia.

In addition to his experience in arts education, Kent spent over a decade working in the technology and online education industries including stints as Senior Vice President of Editorial and Product Development at Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1990s and as Senior Vice President at Kaplan University from 2001 to 2008.

As a composer and director, Kent’s own work includes collaborations with artists from around the world and performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and elsewhere.

He received a BFA in Music Composition at Cornish (1982) and an MFA in Art & Technology at SAIC (1985).

Joseph Pellegrino University Professor; Director, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

The central component of Peter Galison's work involves the exploration of twentieth century microphysics (atomic, nuclear, particle physics). In particular, he examines physics as a closely interconnected set of scientific subcultures: experimenters, instrument makers, and theorists. For example, in How Experiments End (Chicago, 1987), he examined the ways in which experimenters come to the decision that they have an effect, not an artifact of the apparatus or environment. What role does theory play in the establishment of data reduction strategies, in triggering, or in the experimental set-up itself? How do large groups decide something is real? More recently, he has been interested in the long-standing competition between image-producing instruments such as bubble chambers, cloud chambers, and nuclear emulsions on one side, and the "logic" devices such as counters, spark chambers, and wire chambers on the other. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, 1997) examines this duality and seeks to locate specific experimental technologies in the wider scientific and nonscientific world. Professor Galison is now turning to a history of postwar quantum field theory, in which he views QFT as a "trading zone" between different domains of physics (e.g. particle cosmology, mathematics, condensed matter physics).

On the side, he has tried to examine links between the history of science and neighboring fields - how, for example, historians of science and historians of art share methods and strategies.

Senior Associate Dean, College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Working in collaborative and cross-disciplinary modes, Kevin produces artworks, archives, and scholarship on such subjects as race and space, public memory, history of technology, and state violence. Recognition for his work has included grants from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, presentation at conferences across Europe and North America (ISEA/ DEAF/CAA/NCA/ACM-SIGCHI), publication in edited journals and anthologies (Routledge/CCCS/Palm Press/UCLA), and invited residencies (Banff/USC-IML/Bratislava).

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As an educator, administrator, and researcher, Kevin is focused on integration of practice-based, historical and theoretical approaches to learning about technological mediation. This work has included the development of several interdisciplinary project-based courses, workshops, and initiatives for students and faculty from the sciences, arts and humanities, with emphases on prototyping, reflection, and methodologies of collaboration.

Associate Vice President - Emerson College; Executive Director - ArtsEmerson

David C. Howse is a recognized speaker and commentator on the arts and social integration, and for over a decade has been a leader in the arts and culture sector.  In his role as Associate Vice President of Emerson College and Executive Director of ArtsEmerson, Howse is part of the three person collaborative leadership team that co-directs Emerson College's multi-faceted Office of the Arts.   Howse is fiscally and administratively responsible for multiple cultural venues in Downtown Boston.

Howse previously served as the Executive Director of the award-winning Boston Children’s Chorus (BCC), an organization that brings youth from the ages of 7 to 18 from the Greater Boston area to create harmony both musically and socially through a shared love of music. The singers’ powerful voices and rich diversity have inspired audiences in Boston and throughout the world.  As a founding staff member, Howse was instrumental in helping grow BCC from a pilot project serving 20 kids in 2003 to a vibrant organization educating over 500 singers in 12 choirs in 5 locations. 

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Howse holds degrees from Bradley University and New England Conservatory of Music and is a graduate of Harvard Business School's Next Generation Executive Leadership Program.  He remains active with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program, a consortium of 100 of the worlds top cultural leaders, which addresses the critical issues that face the arts and cultural sector world-wide.  As a faculty member of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice, David teaches a 22 week leadership and management seminar to nonprofit managers and executives.

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Howse has received numerous awards for his innovative leadership including Root Cause’s Social Innovation Achievement Award and Boston Business Journal's “40 under 40” Award, recognizing him as one of Boston’s best and brightest young executives. David serves on the Board of Corporators for Eastern Bank,  as well as on the boards of Chorus America, Social Innovation Forum, Associated Grant Makers and Forbes House Museum.  He also serves on the Museum of Fine Arts Board of Advisors, the Advisory Council for New England Foundation for the Arts and the corporation of the Community Music Center of Boston.  David formerly served on the South Shore Hospital Board of Directors, and the advisory board of the Eliot School for the Arts.

He lives outside of Boston with his wife, two young boys, and their dog Pluto.

Dean, College of Arts, Media, and Design, Northeastern University

Elizabeth joined Northeastern University as Dean of the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Professor of Music in July 2015. A leader and an accomplished scholar, Elizabeth came to Northeastern from the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was a professor of musicology.

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Elizabeth was the inaugural director of the New Zealand School of Music from 2006 to 2013, overseeing a number of successful initiatives to advance the school’s academic and research programs and international profile.  She crafted a vision for the school, providing rigorous musical and academic leadership across disciplines, fostering new modes of interaction between music and other disciplines, and recruiting outstanding faculty from across the globe.

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During her seven-year tenure as director, Elizabeth’s accomplishments included overhauling the curriculum to enhance professional training, improving the research-teaching nexus, and increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration.  She facilitated the creation of a joint PhD program between music and Engineering, and her leadership established the preeminence of the NZSM’s research faculty in the 2012 national research quality evaluation. On the operational side, she successfully managed the merger of two very different music institutions—Massey’s Conservatorium of Music and Victoria’s School of Music—while also implementing sound financial management and creating a new leadership structure within the school.

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Prior to her tenure at the New Zealand School of Music, Elizabeth held both faculty and administrative leadership positions at the University of Virginia, where she worked to forge relationships across a range of disciplines from media studies and women’s studies to engineering.  As director of undergraduate programs in the McIntire Department of Music, she administered an innovative bachelor’s program that received national acclaim. As director of graduate programs, she led a Ph.D. in music that created a novel and inclusive approach to graduate training, reshaping disciplinary boundaries.  As chair of the department, she recruited outstanding faculty, increased the department’s visibility and fundraising profile, and built upon the distinctive undergraduate and graduate programs at UVA.

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Throughout Elizabeth’s academic career, she has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the University of Virginia Sesquicentennial Associate for the Centre for Advanced Studies, and the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellowship at Downing College, Cambridge University.

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Elizabeth was founding Assistant Editor and later Associate Editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and is currently a member of the executive board of the American Institute of Verdi Studies and an editorial board member of Verdi Forum.  Her critical edition of Verdi’s Il corsaro (published by The University of Chicago Press) has received performances around the world, including at Covent Garden, Trieste, Parma, and Barcelona, and is widely available in a DVD video recording.  She has published in leading academic journals and presses on the operas of Verdi, Donizetti, and Puccini.  Her current work blends approaches from the fields of musicology, Italian Risorgimento history, trauma studies and recent work in the neuroscience of music and emotion to propose a new understanding of Verdi’s middle period operas.

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Elizabeth studied piano at the Manhattan School of Music and in Vienna, and later received her bachelor’s degree from Smith College and her master’s degree and Ph.D., both in musicology, from Cornell University.  She was awarded an AMS 50 Fellowship for her dissertation on Verdi.

Senior Advisor to the Arts and Culture Program, The Kresge Foundation; Institute Professor, Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and College of Public Service and Community Solutions

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson’s expertise is in comprehensive community revitalization, systems change, the dynamics of race and ethnicity and the roles of and arts and culture in communities. She is Institute Professor at Arizona State University in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the College of Public Service and Community Solutions. She is a Senior Advisor to the Kresge Foundation Arts and Culture Program and consults with national and regional foundations and government agencies on strategic planning and research. In 2013, with U.S. Senate confirmation, President Obama appointed Dr. Jackson to the National Council on the Arts. She is on the advisory boards of the Lambent Foundation and L.A. Commons and on the boards of directors of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and The Music Center of Los Angeles County. Previously she was on the boards of the Association for Performing Arts Presenters, the National Performance Network, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Cultural Alliance for Greater Washington, Fund for Folk Culture and the Dunbar Economic Development Corporation. She also advises a number of national and regional projects and initiatives focusing on arts leadership, arts organizations and changing demographics, arts and community development and arts and health. Dr. Jackson has been adjunct faculty at Claremont Graduate University and at the University of Southern California. In the 2014-2015 academic year, Dr. Jackson was also the James Irvine Foundation Fellow in Residence at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Previously, for almost 20 years, Dr. Jackson was based at the Urban Institute, a public policy research organization based in Washington, D.C. There she was a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and founding director of UI’s Culture, Creativity and Communities Program. At UI, she led pioneering research on arts and culture indicators, measuring cultural vitality, the role of arts and culture in community revitalization, development of art spaces, and support systems for artists. She also was a senior researcher on studies of public housing programs, use of urban parks, handgun violence prevention and teacher training initiatives for urban schools.

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Dr. Jackson earned a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Southern California.

Associate Vice Chancellor, Arts and Design - University of California, Berkeley

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. In the fall of 2015, she was appointed to be the first Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design (AVCAD). In this leadership position, Jackson reports to both UC-Berkeley’s Chancellor and to its Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. Her office is responsible for creating new operations and collaborations across departments, centers, presenting organizations, and initiatives in the arts and design for the entire campus. The AVCAD office facilitates communication platforms, research initiatives, student arts access programs, curricular innovation, multi-unit fundraising, public engagement, facilities planning, and local and global partnerships in the arts and design across the campus and with local and international organizations.

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Jackson’s own research and teaching focuses on two broad, overlapping domains 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent book is The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (M.I.T. Press, 2015).  Her previous books include  Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011), Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004).  “Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Commons,” co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon, is forthcoming from the New Museum/M.I.T. Press. Other projects include the guest-edited Valuing Labor in the Arts with Art Practical, a forthcoming special issue of Representations on time-based art, and an online platform of keywords in experimental art and performance, In Terms of Performance, created in collaboration with the Pew Center for Art and Heritage. Her writing has also appeared in dozens of museum catalogues, journals, blogs, and edited collections.

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Jackson has received numerous awards, including a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Performance Studies (NCA), the ATHE Best Book Award, Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Kahan Scholar’s Prize in Theatre History (ASTR), and the Arts and Humanities Outstanding Service Award.  She has received fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as several collaborative project grants from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, UCIRA, the Creative Work Fund, the Pedar Sather Center, the San Francisco Foundation, and the LEF Foundation.

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Jackson serves on the boards of Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the English Institute, and the Oakland Museum of California. She also serves on the advisory boards of several journals and arts organizations; she has been a plenary speaker at a variety of distinguished venues, including most recently the Venice Biennial, ArtCOP21, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the PUBLIC Theater, Tate Modern, Creative Time, the Sorbonne, the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, Open Engagement, the Ibsen International Festival in Oslo, the Blaffer Museum, The Kitchen, Cooper Union, the Yale School of Drama, Harvard’s Spencer Lecture in Drama, and many other universities and art organizations. She has organized dozens of conferences, symposia, and artist residencies with the Arts Research Center, the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, Art Practical, Cal Performances, BAMPFA, Open Engagement, The Builders Association, Touchable Stories, American Society of Theatre Research, the American Studies Association, the Women and Theatre Project, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Multi-campus Research Group on International Performance, UCB’s Center for Community Innovation, and with the civic governments of Berkeley, San Francisco, and Richmond, California.

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Shannon was an Erasmus Mundus visiting professor in Paris at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Nord and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles for the 2008-09 academic year. Before moving to Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of English and Literature at Harvard University from 1995 to 1998.

Associate Professor - Northeastern University

Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist and writer examining the politics of landscape and public space. Her research-based creative projects trace the production of landscape through ecological, historical, and legal forces, particularly focusing on the environmental and cultural effects of military activities. Her award-winning, feature-length film, Around Crab Orchard, addresses how the politics of conservation and environmental justice are imbricated with military and penal economies deeply in an American wildlife refuge. She is one half of the National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation service, a ‘wishful’ government agency addressing the cultural and ecological impacts of nuclear militarism, and a core member of Compass, an art collaborative currently staging a series of performative hearings into the intergenerational and inter-species impacts of industrial agriculture on regional and global systems. Working with Nicholas Brown, she recently published the photo-text book Re-Collecting Black Hawk, addressing landscapes of settler commemoration in the Midwest. Her work has been screened or exhibited at Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, the Cooper Union, the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and in numerous festivals and spaces at such institutions as CUNY Graduate Center, George Mason University, University of California Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin. She has written extensively about performative and site-based contemporary art practices in Art Journal, Acme, Leonardo, and Parallax, and in the books Critical Landscapes, Art Against the Law, and Mapping Environmental Issues in the City. She is Associate Professor of Media Arts at Northeastern University.

Executive Director of Arts Initiatives, Center for Art, Science & Technology – Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Leila W. Kinney is the Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and of the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), working with Associate Provost Philip S. Khoury, the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the Creative Arts Council, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the MIT Museum, to advance the arts at MIT in the areas of strategic planning, cross-school collaborations, communications and resource development.

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Kinney is an art historian with experience in both SA+P, where she was on the faculty in the History, Theory and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture (HTC) and SHASS, where she taught in the Program in Women’s Studies and in Comparative Media Studies. She specializes in modern art, with an emphasis on media in transition, arts institutions and artists’ engagement with mass culture. She is a member of the Executive Committee of a2ru (Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities) and of the Advisory Committees of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the MIT Museum.

Dean, College of Arts and Architecture - Penn State

Barbara Oliver Korner has been dean of the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture since June 2007, during which time she has overseen the development of a bustling Arts District on the northern end of campus. 

A national leader in arts in higher education, Dean Korner served as co-director of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s (ATHE) Leadership Institute from 2000 to 2016. She co-founded the institute, which has worked with more than 250 faculty and administrators, with Mark Heckler, president of Valparaiso University. In 2016, she and Heckler were co-recipients of ATHE’s Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Academic Theatre.

Dean Korner serves on the board of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) and the executive committee of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), of which Penn State is a founding partner. The partnership involves thirty-five major research universities and includes a wide range of disciplines. She previously served on the board of directors of ATHE and of the International Council of Fine Arts Deans. At Penn State, she served as chair of the United Way Campaign, the Forum Speakers series, and the Academic Leadership Council.

Before coming to Penn State, she was associate and interim dean in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Florida. She previously served as dean of fine and performing arts at Seattle Pacific University and special assistant to the chancellor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, in addition to positions at Ohio University. Dean Korner holds a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary fine arts from Ohio University, where she was named a Distinguished Alumna in 2004. She also holds a master’s in theatre performance and an undergraduate degree in theatre production. She maintains an active role as a performing artist and is the writer and performer of Responding to the Call: African-American Women Preachers and co-editor of Hardship and Hope: Missouri Women Writing about their Lives. 

Barbara Korner was a founding member of a2ru and served as a former (and the first) chair of the a2ru Executive Committee.

Senior Fellow for Arts, Culture and Equitable Development, PolicyLink

Jeremy Liu, Senior Fellow for Arts, Culture and Equitable Development, is an award-winning artist, urban planner, and real estate developer who has completed complex public-private projects as the former executive director of two community development corporations. He co-founded Creative Ecology Partners, a design and innovation lab for community development, and Creative Development Partners, a "Community Benefits by Design" real estate company. He also co-founded the National Bitter Melon Council which promotes the literal and poetic potential of Bitter Melon (Momordica charantia). For PolicyLink, he is guiding an initiative to integrate arts and culture into the work of community development to accelerate equity. He is a board member of The Center for Neighborhood Technology, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Interaction Institute for Social Change.

MacArthur Fellow, Founder, Project Row Houses, University of Houston Faculty

Rick Lowe is an artist whose unconventional approach to community revitalization has transformed a long-neglected neighborhood in Houston into a visionary public art project that continues to evolve, two decades since its inception. Originally trained as a painter, Lowe shifted the focus of his artistic practice in the early 1990s in order to address more directly the pressing social, economic, and cultural needs of his community. With a group of fellow artists, he organized the purchase and restoration of a block and a half of derelict properties—twenty-two shotgun houses from the 1930s—in Houston’s predominantly African American Third Ward and turned them into Project Row Houses (PRH), an unusual amalgam of arts venue and community support center.

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Since its founding in 1993, PRH has served as a vital anchor for what had been a fast-eroding neighborhood, providing arts education programs for youth, exhibition spaces and studio residencies for emerging and established artists, a residential mentorship program for young mothers, an organic gardening program, and an incubator for historically appropriate designs for low-income housing on land surrounding the original row houses. While inviting constant collaboration with local residents, artists, church groups, architects, and urban planners, Lowe continues to provide the guiding vision for PRH as he pursues his overarching goal of animating the assets of a place and the creativity of its people. He is not only bringing visibility and pride to the Third Ward by celebrating the beauty of its iconic shotgun houses; he is also changing the lives of many PRH program graduates and expanding the PRH campus to cover a six-block area in an effort to preserve the historic district’s character in the face of encroaching gentrification.

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Lowe has initiated similarly arts-driven redevelopment projects in other cities, including the Watts House Project in Los Angeles, a post-Katrina rebuilding effort in New Orleans, and, most recently, a vibrant community market in a densely populated, immigrant neighborhood in North Dallas. Lowe’s pioneering “social sculptures” have inspired a generation of artists to explore more socially engaged forms of art-making in communities across the country.

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Rick Lowe attended Columbus College and studied visual arts at Texas Southern University in Houston. He is currently the artist-in-residence at the Nasher Sculpture Center and a Mel King Community Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his work has been exhibited at such national and international venues as Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. His other community building projects have included the Arts Plan for the Seattle Public Library, the Borough Project for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Delray Beach Cultural Loop in Florida, among others.

Head of Classical Voice – Victoria University, Wellington

Margaret Medlyn is one of Australasia’s finest singers, with consistently highly acclaimed performances in opera, oratorio and recitals, as soloist with the major choirs and symphony orchestras, and with both the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts and Perth International Festival of the Arts.

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English-born, Medlyn immigrated to New Zealand as a child.  After graduating with a Bachelor of Music in Performance from the University of Auckland and winning several scholarships, she went back to the UK, where she made her operatic debut as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier with London’s Opera Viva, after which she performed with Kent Opera, touring with them for four years. Since then, while based back in New Zealand, she has sung for English National Opera, Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera and all the companies in Australasia, and worked with leading international conductors including Mark Elder, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simone Young, Donald Runnicles, Jeffrey Tate, Edo de Waart, Markus Stenz, Jaap van Sweden and Roger Norrington. Her roles include Leonore (Il trovatore), Aida, Tosca, Turandot, Giorgetta (Il tabarro), Maddalena (Andrea Chenier), Marie (Wozzeck), Salome, Judith (Bluebeard’s Castle), Agathe (Der Freischütz), Kostelnicka (Jenufa), and a range of Wagnerian roles, from Kundry and Isolde, to Senta, Sieglinda, Fricka, and various Rhinemaidens and Valkyries. In addition to her operatic roles, Margaret Medlyn has had a long and varied recital and concert career; she is a national recording artist for Radio New Zealand and has recorded an extensive list of recital programmes.

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Medlyn is an experienced voice teacher – she has taught in New Zealand and the UK in her private studio for 35 years, and at the New Zealand School of Music/Victoria University since 2007, where she is currently Head of Classical Voice. Every year she tutors alongside Professor Paul Farrington at the New Zealand Opera School, where she works with undergraduate and postgraduate students and Opera New Zealand’s Emerging Artists. Many of her students have had success in competitions including the most recent Lexus Song Quest.

In 2012, she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in recognition of her services to opera. Medlyn has recently expanded her research through her Ph.D. dissertation, Embodying Voice: singing Verdi, singing Wagner, which she completed in 2016.

Chancellor Emeritus, Professor – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

James Moeser is Chancellor Emeritus, Professor of Music, and Senior Consultant for Special Initiatives at the UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities. He has served as the Interim Chancellor for the UNC School of the Arts, and for the 2016-17 year, he was also Acting Director for the UNC Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

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Moeser received his undergraduate degree in organ performance at the University of Texas, where he was student of E William Doty.  As a Fulbright scholar, he studied in Berlin with Michael Schneider and in Paris with Marcel Dupre.  He received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan, where he was a student of Marilyn Mason.

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At the age of twenty-seven, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Kansas as the chair of the Department of Organ. In addition, he served as organist-choirmaster of Plymouth Congregational Church in Lawrence. Over the next twenty years, he built a reputation as one of the nation’s leading recitalists, church musicians, and teachers.  As a concert artist, he was represented by the Lilian Murtagh (later Karen McFarlane) Concert Management, the nation’s leading presenter of organ recitalists.  He concertized widely in the U. S. and Europe.  In 1975, he became the dean of the University of Kansas School of Fine Arts, beginning a career that gradually led him into administration.  In 1984, he was named to the Carl and Ruth Althaus Distinguished Professorship in Organ, the first academic dean at KU ever awarded an endowed faculty position.

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Moeser left Kansas in 1986 to become the dean of the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State University. During this time, he also served as president of the American Guild of Organists. In 1992, he resigned from the concert management, playing his last recital in 1992, and became the provost of the University of South Carolina.  He served as chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1996, and from 2000-2008 served as Chancellor of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Among his many accomplishments at the helm of UNC Chapel Hill, Moeser is credited with creating the Carolina Covenant, a program to provide a debt-free education to low-income students that became a national model for improving access to higher education.

Director, The Design School, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University

Jason Schupbach is the Director of The Design School at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. He was previously the Director of Design and Creative Placemaking Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw all design and creative placemaking grantmaking and partnerships, including Our Town and Design Art Works grants, the Mayors Institute on City Design, the Citizens Institute on Rural Design, and the NEA's Federal agency collaborations.  Previous to his current position, Jason served Governor Patrick of Massachusetts as the Creative Economy Director, tasked with growing creative and tech businesses in the state. He formerly was the Director of ArtistLink, a Ford Foundation funded initiative to stabilize and revitalize communities through the creation of affordable space and innovative environments for creatives. He has also worked for the Mayor of Chicago and New York Citys Department of Cultural Affairs.  He has written extensively on the role of arts and design in making better communities, and his writing has been featured as a Best Idea of the Day by the Aspen Institute.

Chair, Department of Architecture; Associate Vice President for Research in Design, Arts and Humanities; Founding Director, OpenGrounds; Laurence Lewis Jr. Professor of Architecture, University of Virginia

William Sherman is the Chair of the Department of Architecture, the Lawrence Lewis Jr. Professor of Architecture, Associate Vice President for Research in Design, Arts and Humanities, and the Founding Director of the OpenGrounds initiative at the University of Virginia. As an architect and educator, his teaching and design research examine dynamic cultural and environmental processes in architectural design, ranging in scale from human physiology to global energy flows. His work explores the intersection of these processes with the cultural frameworks that inform the design of buildings and cities, with a particular focus on emerging spaces for creative engagement and institutional transformation.

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His design work, ranging in scale from furniture to communities, has been published internationally and has received numerous awards, including six from the American Institute of Architects, five for Design Excellence at the national, state and local levels and one for Excellence in Education. In 2010, he was awarded the Z Society Distinguished Faculty Award at the University of Virginia and the Creative Achievement Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

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In 2012, Sherman founded OpenGrounds, a network of places and programs that inspire creative research at the confluence of technology, science, the arts and humanities.  He designed both the spaces and programs of OpenGrounds to serve as catalysts for cross-disciplinary research collaborations and new institutional partnerships that inspire the conception, development and implementation of transformational ideas. He has lectured widely on the concept of OpenGrounds and serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Alliance for the Arts at Research Universities.

Federal Relations Officer, Association of American Universities

Julia Smith joined the Association of American Universities in 2010, and is currently the Senior Federal Relations Officer. She is responsible for funding and policy issues related to the humanities, the Department of Defense and USDA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.

She is also responsible for funding issues for the Department of Education's student aid, international, and graduate education programs. Her work related to these agencies includes monitoring legislation, participating in agency specific advocacy coalitions, engaging with both agency and congressional staff, and attending hearings.

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AAU is a founding organization of the Golden Goose Award, and Julia serves on the steering committee for the Award. She has managed the annual ceremony and related activities each year since its inception.

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Prior to joining AAU, Julia worked on President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She volunteers with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) and the Human Rights Campaign, both of which are headquartered in Washington, DC.

Julia received her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She spent a year studying the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Dean, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University

Steven J. Tepper is the dean of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, the nations largest, comprehensive design and arts school at a research university. Tepper is a leading writer and speaker on U.S. cultural policy and his work has fostered national discussions around topics of cultural engagement, creative work and careers, art and democracy, and the transformative possibilities of a 21st century creative campus. He is the author of Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest Over Art and Culture in America (University of Chicago, 2011) and co-editor and contributing author of the book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of Americas Cultural Life (Routledge 2007).  Prior to ASU, Tepper was on the faculty at Vanderbilt University where he was a chief architect of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, a national think tank for cultural policy and creativity. Tepper holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; a master's in public policy from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government; and a PhD in sociology from Princeton University.

Assistant Director, Arts Research Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University

Salem Tsegaye is assistant director for the Arts Research Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (VCUarts), where she supports faculty research development and fosters arts-inclusive interdisciplinary collaboration. Prior to joining VCUarts, Tsegaye worked at The New York Community Trust, a community foundation, managing two collaborative funds: the New York City Cultural Agenda Fund, supporting arts advocacy and cultural policy and equity, and the Fund for New Citizens, supporting immigrant rights advocacy, immigration legal services, and capacity-building for immigrant-led nonprofits. Tsegaye also has worked as a grant writer for the Queens Museum, as an instructor of design theory and criticism at Parsons The New School for Design, and as a technical assistance provider to small and mid-size nonprofits and government agencies specializing in health and human service provision. She holds an MA in Design Studies from Parsons and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Formerly, Tsegaye served on the editorial team for Createquity, a virtual think tank and online publication investigating important issues in the arts.

Art History Lecturer - UMass Dartmouth

Rebecca Uchill joins us from MIT, where she spent the last two years as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Art, Science & Technology.  She has extensive experience in publishing, museum work, event production, and academia. Uchill is editor of Art Journal Open, a publication of the College Art Association, and has held positions at Mass MoCA and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others. Recently, she was guest curator for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, where she organized the exhibition Futurefarmers: Errata—Brief Interruptions (2017). She has produced interdisciplinary art programs in venues ranging from lecture halls to school buses to Bulgarian rooftops, particularly as co-founder of the interdisciplinary curatorial group Experience Economies. A dedicated teacher, she has served as a visiting professor at Tufts/SMFA and MIT, where she was awarded a grant to lead a graduate-level research-based excursion in the American Southwest to view potent and contested sites of land art, land use, and landscape.

Uchill has presented her scholarship internationally and across the disciplines of arts, sciences, and the humanities, most recently at the annual conferences for the Society for Social Sciences of Science and the College Art Association, and as a keynote speaker for the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She is co-editor, with Caroline A. Jones and David Mather, of Experience: Culture, Cognition and the Common Sense, published by MIT Press in 2016; she has also authored exhibition catalogues and contributions to Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory (Mousse Publishing), Future Anterior, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Art Papers, Art New England, and other scholarly journals and art periodicals. Her dissertation research on curator Alexander Dorner will appear next year in an MIT Press publication organized by the RISD Museum. Her current research imperatives include the matters of landscapes and urbanisms, technologies and materialisms of contemporary art, and histories that confront the apparatuses of power that produce the canon. Uchill received her PhD from MIT, her MA from Williams College, and her BA from NYU.

Director of Arts and Creativity, Barr Foundation

E. San San Wong directs Barr’s Arts & Creativity portfolio. She currently serves on the Steering Committee for the City of Boston’s cultural planning process and on the board of Grantmakers in the Arts, a national leadership and service organization that supports the growth of arts and culture.

Prior to joining Barr in 2012, San San served as director of grants at the San Francisco Arts Commission, executive director of the National Performance Network, director of development and special initiatives at Theatre Artaud, and as a performing arts producer and presenter. As an international arts consultant, her clients included the Ford Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, and Res Artis, among many others.

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San San earned a master’s degree in community psychology from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in clinical psychology from Smith College. Her life feels incomplete if she averages fewer than five cultural events a week.