Arts, Culture, and Museums

Hi, I’m Jesenia Angeles, MPH, founder of Cósmica Consulting, LLC. I collaborate with communities and organizations to bring arts based evaluation to public health, education, and creative initiatives, listening deeply and presenting findings in ways that reflect the people we serve. Arts based evaluation uses creative, human centered methods to capture lived experience and turn

Hello, I’m Brianna Smith. I serve as the Program Manager at Performance Hypothesis—a small but mighty arts and health firm. At Performance Hypothesis, I manage and evaluate several arts and health programs. Thank you for navigating to my blog! I hope you find this a quick and uplifting read. While intertwining the arts into health

Hi, I’m Patricia Moore Shaffer, founder of ArtsInSight, a division of Shaffer Evaluation Group. This month, I am closing a four-year engagement with a complex, arts- and humanities-based social change initiative designed to advance climate equity and resilience in a large U.S. city. I want to share some lessons learned about evaluation methods that can

Jori Hall, PhD, is a President’s Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology at University of Illinois Chicago. Marcel Foster, MPH, is the founder/director of Performance Hypothesis, serves as an Evaluation Associate for the Jameel Arts & Health Lab at NYU. Jori and Marcel, in addition to being troublemakers, are published enthusiasts on culturally responsive evaluation. Kick

This post was originally released on AEA365 in 2023, and was so popular the first time around, it is being reshared from the archives at the request of the Arts, Culture, and MuseumTIG. I’m Vincent E Thomas, a dancer/choreographer/professor. I move the body as a way to unearth layers of self for deeper understanding of

Sister IAsia Thomas is an equity practitioner, arts administrator, director for Children’s Windows to Africa, and is a multi-disciplinary artist whose creative work is guided by Dr. Asa Hilliard’s precepts on Being an African Teacher and Fu-Kiau’s Kindezi: The Kongo Art of Babysitting. Thomas served as Pittsburgh Public Schools from 2014 – 2024 as project

I am Shanaé Burch, an artist, public health creative, and cultural worker. I believe in the power of storytelling to revive health and reconcile hearts, so I study health justice and equity through the lens of better leveraging arts and culture for wellbeing with contemplative arts-based research methods. This blog begins with a statement of

Justin Laing is the principal of Hillombo LLC, a capital and race critical strategy, research, planning, and evaluation consultancy rooted in Black Studies.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that the justness and criticality of my evaluation or reflection work is related to my consideration of the dominating histories of “culture” in Western Europe and the U.S. I have been persuaded by the argument of Raymond Williams, in “Culture and Society: 1780-1950,” that “culture,” as it is exists today in the name of philanthropic “arts and culture” programs, originated in the 18th and 19th centuries as a strategy of capitalist reform and perpetuation. Worsening matters, Williams’ case for “culture as reform” connects well with Dylan Rodriguez’s argument that reform is a strategy of counterinsurgency.

¡Hola/Hello! My Name is Eva Maria Chavez (Eva, as in “4-eh-vah-eh-vah”), and I am a community-based evaluator and organizer who, until recently, worked at The Music Center of Los Angeles (TMC). TMC provides cultural events for the diverse community of Los Angeles County. My role was to operationalize the theory of change across the organization

Greetings from Vidhya Shanker, convener of The May 13 Group. Art history taught me to ask why makers choose some forms and not others. In his video echoing the idea that Nicky Bowman, Jara Dean-Coffey, and myself have shared—to use a forest ecosystem instead of a single tree as a metaphor for the knowledge economy