Workshop in Cultural Affairs

The Workshop in Cultural Affairs series advances the Center for Cultural Affairs’ priorities around training, research, and field-building. These biweekly workshops will highlight researchers at the O'Neill School, the greater Indiana University community, and beyond. The workshop connects cultural affairs experts together in a forum for scholarly discussion, debate, and exploration of the important issues being faced in the field of cultural affairs.

Carole Rosenstein, George Mason University, Joanna Woronkowicz & Doug Noonan, Indiana University
September 18, 12pm EST

Topics from: "Innovating Institutions and Inequities in the Arts"

Carole Rosenstein, PhD is Professor of Arts Management and affiliated Professor of Folklore at George Mason University, where she directs the MFA Arts Management Concentration. Carole studies cultural policy and the social life of the arts and culture, focusing on cultural democracy and cultural equity. Her research portfolio includes commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Understanding Cultural Policy (2e, 2024).

Joanna Woronkowicz is a cultural economist who conducts research on labor, capital, and technological investments in arts and culture. She joined O’Neill in 2013 and prior to that was the senior research officer for the National Endowment for the Arts. Woronkowicz is co-founder and faculty director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and co-director of the Arts, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab. Her first book, Building Better Arts Facilities: Lessons from a U.S. National Study, was published by Routledge in 2015. Her forthcoming book, Being an Artist in America: How Artists Build Careers and What Society Can Do to Support Them will be published with Stanford University Press.

Doug Noonan is a professor at the O’Neill School at IU Indianapolis. His research focuses on a variety of policy and economics issues related to the cultural affairs, urban environments, neighborhood dynamics, and quality-of-life. His research has been sponsored by a variety of organizations (e.g., National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, National Endowment for the Arts) on topics like policy adoption, environmental risks, energy, air quality, spatial modeling, green urban revitalizations, and cultural economics. He joined the O’Neill School in 2013 after spending more than a decade on the faculty at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. He is currently the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cultural Economics, co-founder and Faculty Director IU Center for Cultural Affairs, and co-director of the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab.

Justin O'Connor, University of South Australia
October 2, 6pm EST

Topic: "Culture Is Not an Industry"

Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia and Visiting Professor at the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Between 2012-18 he was a member of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity. Previously he helped set up Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS) and has advised cities in Europe, Russia, Korea, Vietnam and China. Under the UNESCO/EU Technical Assistance Programme he has worked with the Ministries of Culture in both Mauritius and Samoa. He is currently working with the Reset Collective.

Justin is co-editor of the 2015 Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries and of Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City, (2018), Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Asia (2020) and Different Histories, Shared Futures. Dialogues on China and Australia (2022).

He recently co-authored Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020), Reset: Art, Culture and the Foundational Economy (in Dutch, Starfish Books), and Culture is Not an Industry will come out with Manchester University Press.

More information at https://justin-oconnor.com/.

Dave O'Brien, University of Manchester & Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University
October 16, 12pm EST

Topics from: "Innovating Institutions and Inequities in the Arts"

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Manchester. He has written extensively on issues in the cultural and creative economy. These include culture and urban regeneration, policymakers' use of evidence, the stratification of cultural consumption, and inequalities in cultural work. He is the co-author of Culture is bad for you, and with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Creative Diversity the Creative Majority and Making the Creative Majority reports. He is currently on a UKRI funded secondment to the UK government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Dr. Kathryn Brown is Reader in Art Histories, Markets, and Digital Heritage at Loughborough University. In addition to numerous articles, book chapters, and edited collections, her publications include, Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (2012), Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (2017), Henri Matisse: A Critical Life (2021), Dialogues with Degas: Influence and Antagonism in Contemporary Art (2023), and Art Auctions: Spectacle and Value in the 21st Century (2024). Her research has been funded by the British Academy, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC), the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Beinecke Library (Yale University), the Independent Social Research Foundation, and the UK's Association for Art History. She is the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic.

Christos Makridis, Arizona State University
October 30, 12pm EDT

Topic: “The Geography and Returns to Private Arts Organizations”

Christos serves as an Associate Research Professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business and Research Affiliate at the Global Security Initiative (both in Arizona State University), a Visiting Associate Faculty at the University of Nicosia, a Digital Fellow at the Digital Economy Lab in Stanford University, a Non-resident Fellow at the Institute for Religious Studies at Baylor University, and Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub. Christos holds a Bachelor's in Economics and Mathematics from Arizona State University, and dual Master and PhD's in Economics and Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University.

Jongmin(Min) Lee & Michael Rushton, Indiana University
November 13, 12pm EDT

Topics from: "Innovating Institutions and Inequities in the Arts"

Jongmin(Min) Lee is a PhD candidate from O'Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interest centers on effective and meaningful collaborations among government entities, nonprofits, and citizens within the policy process, and explores ways to mitigate obstacles to collaborations, thereby improving their overall efficacy. Her current project examines interactions within government grants to nonprofits in arts and culture.

Michael Rushton is Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, where he taught in the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a founding co-director of the Center for Cultural Affairs. His most recent book is The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan,2023).

Jamie Hand & Maura Cuffie, Creatives Rebuild New York
December 4, 12pm EDT

Topic: “Creatives Rebuild New York Guaranteed Income Program”

Jamie Hand is the Director of Strategic Impact and Narrative Change for Creatives Rebuild New York. From 2014 to 2020, she was the Director of Research Strategies for ArtPlace America, where she designed and led cross-sector knowledge and network building efforts to embed arts and cultural practice within the community development field. Prior to ArtPlace, Jamie worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, where she launched the Our Town grant program, oversaw the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, and advised on interagency efforts including Rebuild by Design. Previously, she worked at Van Alen Institute and for public artist Topher Delaney. Jamie’s background in landscape architecture and her strengths as an editor, facilitator, researcher, and designer reflect a unique combination of rigor and flexibility – with methods that honor both the linear and the nonlinear, the established and the experimental, the known and the unknown, the logic model and the lived experience. Jamie holds a BA from Princeton University’s School of Architecture, and a Master of Design Studies in landscape urbanism from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She serves as past chair of ioby.org (“in our back yards”) and on the board of the Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts and Sciences.

Maura Cuffie-Peterson is a facilitator, strategist, and designer. Currently, she serves as the Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Guaranteed Income program at Creatives Rebuild New York. Previously she was the Senior Program Officer for ArtPlace America from 2018 to 2021. During that time she conceived and executed the Local Control, Local Field(s) initiative, a novel approach to participatory and trust-based philanthropy. This initiative placed over $12.5M directly under the control of practitioners across the country. She has held a variety of positions in arts, culture, and organizational change. As a co-founder of the collective, the Free Breakfast Program, she participated as a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project in 2015 and in the inaugural cohort for leaders of color in EmcArts’ Arts Leaders as Cultural Innovators Fellowship in 2016.

Workshop Alums

Andrew Zitcer, Drexel University

Victoria Durrer, UC Dublin

Léonie Hénaut, University of Madison-Wisconsin

Ziv Espstein, Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI

Stephen Reily, Remuseum

Giacomo Negro, Emory University
Nicole Cohen, University of Toronto
Greig de Peuter, Wilfrid Laurie
Brent Lutes, U.S. Copyright Office
Felix Koenig, Carnegie Mellon
Patricia Banks, Mount Holyoke College

James Pawelski and Katherine Cotter, University of Pennsylvania

Diane Ragsdale and Shannon Litzenberger, Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Ken Elpus, University of Maryland

Jennifer Novak-Leonard, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Laurence Dubuc, MassCulture

Wen Guo, Elon University

Johanna Taylor, Arizona State University

Kate Preston Keeney, College of Charleston

Mark Taylor, University of Sheffield

Eleonora Redaelli, University of Oregon

Amy Whitaker, New York University

Amanda J. Ashley, Boise State University

Jennifer Benoit-Bryan, Slover Linett Audience Research

Jakob Brounstein, University of California, Berkeley

Bronwyn Coate, RMIT University

Susan Dumais, Lehman College

Tal Feder, Sapir College

Alexandre Frenette, Vanderbilt University

Carl Grodach, Monash University

Steven Hadley, National University of Ireland Galway

Mirae Kim, George Mason University

Brian Kisida, University of Missouri

Carolyn Loh, Wayne State University

Lénia Marques, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Candace Miller, University of North Carolina

Alisa Moldavanova, Wayne State University

Doug Noonan, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Susan Oman, University of Sheffield

Jonathan Paquette, University of Ottawa

Michael Rushton, Indiana University

Michael Seman, Colorado State University

Rachel Skaggs, Ohio State University

Tamás Szabados, Eötvös Loránd University

Neville Vakharia, Drexel University

Qingfang Wang, University of California Riverside

Hannah Wohl, University of California, Santa Barbara

Joanna Woronkowicz, Indiana University

Artwork credit: Banner image by photographer, James Brosher.

Workshop in Cultural Affairs