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Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

BIO

A speaker, writer, and advisor on a range of arts and culture topics, Diane Ragsdale is director and co-lead faculty of the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity. In June 2020 she completed a three-year appointment as assistant professor at The New School (TNS) in Manhattan, where she successfully launched, built, and directed a one-of-a-kind MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship for performance-based artists. While at TNS she also designed, secured funding for, and launched a new graduate minor in Creative Community Development focused on the role of artists in building healthier, more equitable and more sustainable communities.

Alongside these posts, Diane teaches a workshop on Cultural Policy at Yale University for its Theater Management MA and is a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (in the Netherlands), where she lectured 2011-2015 in the cultural economics and sociology of the arts programs. Diane additionally provides a range of advising, research, and education services to the arts and culture sector (in the US and abroad); and is a frequent provocateur or interlocutor at arts conferences and symposiums around the world.

From 2004-2010, Diane was a program officer for theater and dance at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in NYC; and, before that, she served as managing director of the contemporary performing arts center, On the Boards (Seattle) and executive director of an eclectic music festival in the small resort town of Sandpoint, Idaho. She also held part-time stints at a handful of other US music, arts, and film festivals (Sundance, Seattle International Film Festival, WOMAD USA, and Bumbershoot). Early in her career Diane trained and worked as a theatermaker.

Diane has contributed articles to several publications, including “On Entrepreneurship and Publicness (Or, Whose Theatre is it, Really?)” for the Winter 2017 issue of Artivate; “Recreating Fine Arts Institutions,” which was published in the fall 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review; and “Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy,” which was commissioned and published in 2011 by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (the RSA). She has contributed essays to a few books including: “To What End Permanence,” for the recently published book A Moment on the Clock of the World (Haymarket 2019); “Creative Destruction” in Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art (edited by Clayton Lord and published by Theatre Bay Area in 2012); and “Producer-Consumer Engagement: The Lessons of Slow Food for the Reflective Arts” in Building Communities, Not Audiences (by Doug Borwick 2012).

She has served on the editorial board of Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts since 2011; has served on various committees for the online platform and journal HowlRound, including its present advisory board; and is a board member for Anne Bogart’s SITI Company and Marty Pottenger’s Art At Work.

Diane’s doctoral research centers on the relationship between nonprofit resident professional theaters in America and Broadway (the commercial theater center in the US), and how this relationship has evolved since the mid-twentieth century. (Those interested in this topic may want to read her 2011 HowlRound publication, In the Intersection: Partnerships in the New Play Sector, a report on a meeting of nonprofit and commercial theater producers).

Diane lectured at the New School on the cultural and creative industries and taught the course The Entrepreneurial Incubator, through which students designed their capstone experiences (independently produced projects that demonstrate their skills as socially engaged artist-entrepreneurs). Diane also lectured extensively at Erasmus University, on such topics as the creative economy & creative organizations, arts management, and the organization of art and culture. In 2015 she was visiting guest artist/lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the aegis of the Business School, where she designed and taught an experimental course on aesthetics and business (called Approaching Beauty: Aesthetic Development in Work and Life). You can read about this course on Jumper. She has carried on this work on aesthetic values in a changed cultural context in her teaching at both the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and Yale.

Diane holds an MFA in Acting & Directing from University of Missouri Kansas City, as well as a BS in Psychology and BFA in Theater from Tulane University in New Orleans.  In 2002, she attended the inaugural Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (a program of National Art Strategies). In the past decade she has attended three Salzburg Global Seminars–twice as a participant, and once as a speaker; and has participated in a week-long training/residency program with the organization Common Cause. In 2019 she completed the week-long Banff Centre leadership intensive Truth and Reconciliation Through Right Relations; was a participant in Patti Digh’s course Hard Conversations: Racism; and received a certificate of completion for a 40-hour course in Mediation and Creative Conflict Resolution with the Center for Understanding in Conflict.

Diane is married to Dutchman Jaap Boter, a scholar with posts at the University of Amsterdam and the VU Amsterdam.  She has dual citizenship and divides her time between the US and the Netherlands.

—Last updated September 2020

Diane Ragsdale

Diane Ragsdale is an Assistant Professor in the College of Performing Arts at The New School, where she also serves as Program Director for the MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship. Alongside her post at the New School Diane teaches on the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada and teaches a workshop on Cultural Policy at Yale University for its Theater Management MA. She is also a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (in the Netherlands), where she lectured 2011-2015 in the cultural economics and sociology of the arts programs. Read More…

Jumper

White's Tree Frog

About 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school, I came across the following poem: When an old pond gets a new frog it’s a new pond. I think the inverse also may be true. I’ve often been the new frog jumping into an old pond. Since 1988, I’ve worked in the arts in the US in various roles … [Read More...]

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Recent Comments

  • Richard Linzer on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Diane, the free manuals that we have created on fully secured borrowing for arts nonprofits, other nonprofits, and individual artists…” Jan 11, 20:48
  • Jon Catherwood-Ginn on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Diane and Jerry – thank you so much for your thoughtful responses to my question! Excellent points regarding the opportunity…” Oct 13, 21:08
  • Jerry Yoshitomi on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Thanks to both of you for your thoughts. One of the great opportunities available through electronic communications will be the…” Oct 6, 01:20
  • Diane Ragsdale on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Dear Jon, thanks for your comment and great question! I’d also be curious what others reading the post might think.…” Oct 5, 09:20
  • Jon Catherwood-Ginn on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Thank you for this, Diane! A fantastic piece. As an extension of your analysis of the interplay among economics, ethics,…” Oct 2, 20:41

Approaching Beauty Course Posts

On artistic leadership and aesthetic values in a changed cultural context: A new keynote address

Last week I had the privilege, pleasure, and honor to give the keynote address at the Canadian Arts Summit--an annual gathering of the board chairs, … [Read More...]

Art for ____________’s sake. What would you fill in?

A few weeks back I was in NYC and had the opportunity to attend a Public Forum event featuring the brilliant Jeremy McCarter reading from his new book … [Read More...]

Irvine asks: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? My answer: Yes.

A couple weeks back the Irvine Foundation launched an online Q&A series, Are We Doing Enough?—aimed at “exploring tough questions about engagement … [Read More...]

A Q&A on the Beauty Class with Students from the SAIC

Recently, I received an email from a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, preparing for a seminar on Arts Organizations in Society. … [Read More...]

It’s creative; but is it beautiful? (My talk at the Pave Symposium on Entrepreneurship and the Arts)

In May, I gave a talk at the Pave Biennial Symposium on Arts & Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. The theme of this year's conference … [Read More...]

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A Few Things I’ve Written

"Surviving the Culture Change", "The Excellence Barrier", "Holding Up the Arts: Can We Sustain What We've Creatived? Should We?" and "Living in the Struggle: Our Long Tug of War in the Arts" are a few keynote addresses I've given in the US and abroad on the larger changes in the cultural environment and ways arts organizations may need to adapt in order to survive and thrive in the coming years.

If you want a quicker read, then you may want to skip the speeches and opt for the article, "Recreating Fine Arts Institutions," which was published in the November 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here is a recent essay commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for the 2011 State of the Arts Conference in London, "Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy".

In 2012 I documented a meeting among commercial theater producers and nonprofit theater directors to discuss partnerships between the two sectors in the development of new theatrical work, which is published by HowlRound. You can get a copy of this report, "In the Intersection," on the HowlRound Website. Finally, last year I also had essays published in Doug Borwick's book, Building Communities Not Audiences and Theatre Bay Area's book (edited by Clay Lord), Counting New Beans.

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