The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and Advisory Board for the Arts (ABA) present Center Stage: Turning the Page, Envisioning a Thriving Post-Pandemic Arts Journalism Landscape, an invigorating and informative live virtual panel discussion featuring some of the country’s leading arts journalists, on Thursday, April 8, 2021, at 10 am (PDT). The free 90-minute industry insider conversation and Q&A, geared for the arts and culture community and moderated by Chris Denby, Founder and CEO of Advisory Board for the Arts, will shed light on post-pandemic artistic resiliency and innovation from the unique perspective of arts and culture observers, critics and scholars.
Panelists include Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Senior Art and Architecture Critic of The Washington Post and a regular contributor to Opera News and Gramophone; Carolina A. Miranda, a Los Angeles Times columnist covering art, architecture and urban design and regular contributor to KCRW’s “Press Play” who was named one of the most influential Latina journalists by CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California; Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and an award-winning author; and Cameron Shaw, the newly appointed executive director of the California African American Museum and former freelance writer and editor for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rachel Fine, Executive Director and CEO of The Wallis, hosts the event.
“With live performances and in-person audiences curtailed during the global pandemic crisis, many arts organizations have shifted their focus during this time, embracing digital innovation as a way to stay connected to their constituents and provide vital support to the artists whose work typically graces their stages and galleries,” says Fine. Moderator Chris Denby added, “This panel discussion will explore such topics as how the absence of traditional arts offerings has shifted the way arts journalists have covered the arts over the past year and what impact, if any, that may have on the future of arts journalism. The panelists will also share their insights on where the arts may be headed in the next six months to two years as we emerge from the pandemic and attempt to return to normalcy and come out stronger.”
Center Stage @ The Wallis, founded in 2017 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, is a Los Angeles community-based panel discussion series established for discourse between arts leaders and scholars around timely culture topics ranging from equity to education and philanthropy. These events are open to the general public and free of charge to attend. During the pandemic, The Wallis has partnered with various organizations to evolve this series from our popular in-person breakfast gatherings to virtual broadcasts, allowing these conversations to extend far beyond geographic limitations.
Registration to the free digital broadcast can be accessed at www.thewallis.org/centerstage.
About the Panelists:
PHILIP KENNICOTT (panelist), is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Senior Art and Architecture Critic of The Washington Post. He has been on staff at The Post since 1999, first as classical music critic, then as culture critic. In 2011, he combined art and architecture into a beat that is focused on everything visual in the nation’s capital. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2013. He is also a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for editorial writing in 2000 and criticism in 2012, a former contributing editor to The New Republic, and a regular contributor to Opera News and Gramophone. His 2015 essay, “Smuggler,” was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and anthologized in that year’s volume of “Best American Essays.” He lives in Washington, D.C.
CAROLINA A. MIRANDA (panelist) is a Los Angeles Times columnist covering art, architecture and urban design, along with various other facets of culture in Los Angeles. Her work often looks at how the arts intersect with politics, gender and race — from the ways in which designers are rethinking the nature of monuments to the ways in which art intersects with development and gentrification. Her weekly Essential Arts newsletter has become required reading. She is a regular contributor to KCRW’s “Press Play” and was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism. She has also received awards from the L.A. Press Club and the Society for Features Journalism. In 2017, Miranda was named one of the most influential Latina journalists by CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California. She was a key member of the committee that helped establish the Los Angeles Times Guild and its first contract with the paper. She served as founding co-chair of the union and an at-large officer. Prior to joining The Times, Miranda was an independent magazine writer and was a contributing art critic at New York Public Radio sister stations WNYC and WQXR. She also produced reports for NPR’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition and PRI’s Studio 360. During her time as a general assignment reporter at TIME, she covered culture, education and social issues.
ALEX ROSS (panelist) has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. He writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the contemporary avant-garde, and has also contributed essays on literature, history, the visual arts, film, and ecology. His first book, The Rest is Nose: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900 published in 2007, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010 and won an ascap-Deems Taylor Award. His third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, an account of Wagner’s vast cultural impact, was published in 2020. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
CAMERON SHAW (panelist) was appointed executive director of the California African American Museum (CAAM) in February 2021. She previously served the Museum as deputy director and chief curator since September 2019. Highlights of her leadership include the successful pivot of the Museum’s public programs from in-person to virtual, necessitated by the pandemic. Prior to her time at CAAM, Shaw was the executive director of New Orleans-based Pelican Bomb, a non-profit contemporary art organization that was a forum for exhibitions, public programs and arts journalism. Shaw lectures and moderates panels on topics including values-based institution building, translating theory to practice, rethinking organizational sustainability, and creative publishing strategies. She was chosen for the NAMAC National Leadership Institute in 2013 and the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Innovators in 2016. In addition to her curatorial practice, Shaw is a widely published writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and BOMB Magazine, as well as in numerous books and exhibition catalogues on various artists. Her writing awards include a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing in 2009 and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation | Art in America Writing Fellowship in 2015
CHRISTOPHER DENBY (moderator), the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Advisory Board for the Arts, draws upon 30 years of experience in the business world and 15 years of involvement with a variety of organizations in the arts and broader, non-profit world. In founding ABA, he set out to synthesize these parallel tracks in service to arts organizations worldwide by adapting a unique advisory model rooted in shared learning and long-term performance improvements. Prior to ABA, Denby was Executive Vice President at the Advisory Board Company, a global technology, best practice research, and consulting firm serving the healthcare industry (now a division of United Healthcare) and higher education (now a division of Gartner) based in Washington, DC. Over the course of his 19 years at Advisory Board Company, Denby led its research division, created its leadership development business, and oversaw best practice research on issues ranging from healthcare strategy and nursing to philanthropy and high-performance leadership. Before that, Denby was a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Co. based out of Washington, DC, and Milan, Italy. During his initial eight years at McKinsey, Chris led projects for a broad spectrum of Fortune 500 companies in industries as diverse as consumer goods, energy, and banking. After leaving Advisory Board Company, Denby re-joined McKinsey in 2018 to lead a portfolio of internal start-up companies focused on data and analytics solutions designed to deepen the impact of McKinsey’s work with clients. During his business career, Denby has been heavily involved in support of arts and nonprofit organizations. He has been Chairman of the Board of The Washington Chorus and Chairman of Postclassical Ensemble. He is on the board of the Oslo International Arts Festival. He also served on the board of St. Albans School and the Halcyon Foundation and worked in support of the arts programs of numerous other organizations, including Washington National Cathedral and Aspen Music Festival and School.