Americans for the Arts

This summer, 10 Diversity in Arts Leadership fellows from all over the country are convening to explore and build skills in arts administration and cultivate knowledge in cultural equity. For 28 years, Americans for the Arts has been hosting the DIAL internship program as an investment in a more equitable arts management field. This series features our DIAL cohort in two parts: five fellows are profiled here and in a later post, five more! Read on to get to know Akilah Hartgrove, Ashley Betances, KeShawn Mellon, Cristal Seda Santiago, and Charis Shin. 

This summer, 12 Diversity in Arts Leadership interns from all over the country are working virtually with New York City-based arts nonprofits for ten weeks to explore and build skills in arts administration, and cultivate knowledge in cultural equity within the arts field. For 27 years, Americans for the Arts has been hosting the DIAL internship program as an investment in a more equitable arts management field. This series features our DIAL NYC cohort in two parts: six interns are profiled here and in a previous post, six more! Read on to get to know Isaiah Shaw, Nailah Williams, Noemi Mangual-Rosa, Rebekah Boggs, Kayla Colon, and Arlene Arevalo.

This summer, 12 Diversity in Arts Leadership interns from all over the country are working virtually with New York City-based arts nonprofits for ten weeks to explore and build skills in arts administration, and cultivate knowledge in cultural equity within the arts field. For 27 years, Americans for the Arts has been hosting the DIAL internship program as an investment in a more equitable arts management field. This series features our 2020 DIAL NYC cohort in two parts: six interns are profiled here and in a later post, six more! Read on to get to know Truth Murray Cole, Chayna Yoshida, Noa Weiss, Julia Lee, Carol Loja, and Allie Li. 

Amid this COVID-19 pandemic, many arts organizations—as well as those outside the sector—have been working to determine how to offset financial impacts on their organizations. One type of program that finds its head on the chopping block is the internship program. For organizations that provide arts internships for an hourly wage or a seasonal stipend, the expenditure for an intern or an internship program may appear to be an added burden at a time when we must all make difficult choices. At Americans for the Arts, we too have unfortunately had to cut our own Summer and Fall internship program to save on expenditures.While that decision had to be made for the organization, the Equity in Arts Leadership team has been able to reimagine the organization’s 28-year-old Diversity in Arts Leadership (DIAL) internship. We recognized the stress and collective trauma our country—and our world—is experiencing during this time, and determined it was important for our team to focus our internship restructure on a deliberate, community-centered approach. In deciding to move forward with our internship program, we had to ask ourselves many questions regarding the feasibility of continuing this program this year. 

Since the age of five, theater has served as my safe place, my platform, my passion, and my megaphone. It empowers me, strengthens me, and mobilizes me in an ethereal and visceral way that nothing else can. And yet, for the first nine years of my theater career, all my directors and theater teachers were white. Even now, years later, the vast majority of the faculty in my college’s theater department are white. This reality is an injustice. And still, my existence is proof that theater, and more broadly, the arts, shape our notions of what is possible for ourselves and the world around us. Art is restorative. Art is transformative. Art is healing. Art is resistance. It is for this reason, among many others, that arts leadership, and especially arts education leadership, must be representative of those who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities.