About

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. Among the things I am most proud include leveraging the architecture of The Grand to provide safe programming during Covid, producing a devised work to explore ways to address blight that didn’t involve bulldozing, producing an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii’s snow goddess Poli’ahu.

I have been trying to think of subjects to address on ArtsHacker, but my goal is to create entries that are relatively evergreen and with Covid, I feel like so much is being rewritten in terms of process and expectation. I think the addition of Eric Rubio is awesome. He is preaching to the choir when he talks about keeping your books up to date as you rather than scrambling at the end of the year or during an audit.