Given space limitations, the Program asks that you contact Kevin Leary (krleary@buffalo.edu) to RSVP for any event which you are interested in attending.  Spring 2022 events will be announced at a later date.

On August 26 and 27, the UB Arts Management will have its 2021-2022 orientation activities.  On August 26, we will gather at UB’s Anderson Gallery (near the South campus) at 11am for introductions and a brief conversation about expectations/procedures in the program.  We will then have lunch and hear from alums Angela Goldberg (Managing Director, Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus) and Jen Swan-Kilpatrick (Exceutive Director, Arts Services Initiative) about why we manage the arts and what to expect in (and out of) the Program.  

On August 27, we will gather at the UB Center for the Arts at 8am and travel as a group to visit arts organizations in Buffalo to discuss their goals as their organizations come out of the COVID-era.  Our first meeting will be with Scott Behrend (Road Less Traveled Productions), Kate LocConti-Alcocer (Irish Classical Theatre COMpany) and Chris Handley (Alleyway Theatre), before moving on to Dan Hart (Executive Director, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra), Dwane Hall (Owner, Sportmen's Tavern), and finishing with a tour of AK Northland.

On September 21, students will meet outside the AK offices in Clifton Hall for an orientation to the new AKG Art Museum.  From there, they will be led through the construction site by senior staff.  Fore more information on the project, please visit the AK's website.

How does race shape the cultural institutions of our society? How do those dynamics produce ongoing racial disparities in the well being of communities; and how can we break down the barriers that often prevent people from seeing themselves in institutions?

Visit format: 45 minute presentation / 20 min Q&A

Raymond Codrington is the Chief Executive Officer at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, NY. Before joining Weeksville Heritage Center, Raymond was Executive Director of Hi-ARTS (hip-hop theater festival). As Senior Research Associate with the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Community Change policy program he co-authored studys on racial equity. Raymond has served as an independent curator and consultant with the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles and the Office of the Mayor (City of Los Angeles) where he developed programing around urban expressive culture. He was the Founding Director of the Julian C. Dixon Institute for Cultural Studies and Curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Raymond also served as the Sandy Boyd Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum's Center for Cultural Understanding and Change. Raymond was Co-Director of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University. He has conducted research across the U.S., U.K. and Latin America involving topics related to race, Hip-Hop, identity and civic engagement. Raymond holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Robin Parkinson, (Vice President, Education & Community Engagement, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra) will join Program students to talk about the various educational programs offered and produced by the BPO.  She will  outline programming from conception to assessment, offering students insights into how the all-important educational component fits into the overall mission and budget structure of the organization, target audiences for these programs, and measuring long-term impacts of these activities.

Robin Parkinson received her Master of Music Degree from The Juilliard School in bassoon performance, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Child Development from Tufts University, as well as a Bachelor of Music from New England Conservatory. Under her direction, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra has reached an all-time high of over 50,000 students served throughout Western New York.  Since joining the BPO staff in 2009, she has led many new initiatives such as live broadcasts of youth concerts into the schools, a neighborhood outreach program called West Side Connection, use of Carnegie Hall’s innovative Link Up program in Buffalo, and an annual Side by Side concert with the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts.  She has also piloted several new adult engagement programs such as the BPO Fantasy Camp and Doctors of the World with the BPO and the multi-media Know the Score series. Robin is an active advocate for music and arts education in Western New York.  She gave the keynote speech for the 2011 New York State PTA Convention in Niagara Falls called, “Becoming an Effective Advocate for Arts Education.”  In May 2012 she received the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts Foundation’s first Friend of the Arts Award.  Most recently in 2015, her work on the BPO’s West Side Connection was recognized with a Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award.  Robin is a member of the leadership team for Buffalo’s Arts Partners for Learning and a graduate of Leadership Buffalo, class of 2019.

The pandemic has forced theatres to fundamentally rethink their essential reliance on live performance and identification with the physical space that they usually inhabit. As they turned to recordings, film productions and intensified social media engagement, they were forced to think about ways to work a-synchronously and in physical isolation from each other. As many theatres look forward to returning to live events and to relying less on the virtual, Mezzocchi opens the debate on how to more intensely involve the digital into contemporary theatre practice and management.

Visit format: Jared Mezzocchi Presentation (30 min) /Panel discussion (60 min): Jared Mezzocchi, Lindsay Hunter (Associate Professor, UB Theatre); Rachel Cook (Artistic Director, “On the Boards” Seattle).

Jared Mezzocchi is an American theatre projection designer and director. In 2020, Jared was named in a Top 5 List in the New York Times as a Theatre Artist spotlit for their innovative work during the pandemic, alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber and Paula Vogel. His work as a co-director and multimedia designer for Sarah Gancher's RUSSIAN TROLL FARM gained him particular notoriety in the New York Times as Critics Pick and noted as one of the first digitally-native successes for virtual theater. In 2017, Mezzocchi won an Obie Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, a Henry Hewes Award, and an Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk Award nomination for his work on Qui Nguyen's Vietgone at the Manhattan Theatre Club. In recognition of his work with the HERE Arts Center in New York City in 2012, Mezzocchi became the first projection designer to receive a Princess Grace Award in theatre. In 2011, Mezzocchi won the Best Original Playwright award at the New Hampshire Theater Awards. He has collaborated with theatre companies in the U.S. and Europe, including Big Art Group, The Builders Association, 3-Legged Dog, Arena Stage, Studio Theater, Theater J, Center Stage, Olney Theatre Center, Everyman Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and Wilma Theater. He teaches projection design at University of Maryland in Washington, D.C. and serves as Artistic Director of Andy's Summer Playhouse, a youth theatre in Wilton, NH.

“If you think simply having quality research at hand is all it takes to lead a data-driven museum, think again! Colleen Dilenschneider is the Chief Market Engagement Officer of IMPACTS Experience, a company specializing in providing high-confidence market research and predictive technology to cultural executives and board members throughout the United States and beyond. As the author of the popular resource website Know Your Own Bone and a board member of a major organization herself, Colleen's personal and professional passions lie in helping museums make smart decisions about engaging audiences. Colleen will talk about her career path to date, and the four key components of becoming a data-informed cultural organization. The hardest thing about leading a data-driven entity isn't just obtaining quality research, but championing the analysis, embracing difficult truths, confronting cognitive biases, and cultivating a culture of curiosity. Spoiler alert: A key to empowering organizations to move forward with hard numbers often lies in those soft skills of patience, teamwork, and leadership.”

Visit format: Colleen Dilenschneider Presentation (40 min)/Q&A 20 min; discussion with Christy Francis, market researcher and marketing instructor in the UB Arts Management Program.

Colleen Dilenschneider is the Chief Market Engagement Officer at IMPACTS Experience, the cultural organization-focused arm of a data and technology company. She works with executive decision-makers who are responsible for ensuring the long-term relevance and financial success of their mission-driven organizations. She is the author and publisher of the popular website Know Your Own Bone, a data-informed strategic resource for cultural organizations, and has been a featured expert in sources ranging from NPR’s Marketplace to The Wall Street Journal. She has been prominently featured in many national museum publications, and as required reading for museum studies and professional development programs nationwide.Widely regarded as a leader of the next generation of nonprofit executive management, Colleen oversees multiple audience engagement initiatives on behalf of clients in the nonprofit and cultural sectors. Colleen has worked with many of the most admired and successful clients in the nonprofit realm, including projects concerning the Monterey Bay Aquarium, California Academy of Sciences, Carnegie Museums, Stanford University, Exploratorium, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), San Diego Zoo, and Wildlife Conservation Society, and currently serves on the Board of Directors at the National Aquarium.

Program students will venture to Kleinhans Music Hall to meet with BPO Archivist, Lauren Becker.  Students will receive a complete tour of Kleinhans, from backstage, to the underbelly, and all the way out to the exterior.  Students will enjoy a historic look back at the BPO and the importance of the concert hall in the overall musical and architectural landscape of Buffalo.

Meeting format: Virtual/Zoom Presentations (10 min each), Discussion (30 min) and Q&A (40 min)

La Tanya S. Autry

As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, La Tanya S. Autry centers social justice and public memory in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public dialogue about the African-American liberation struggle, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography. LaTanya has organized exhibitions and programming at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, and other institutions. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, La Tanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.

Allison M. Glenn

Allison Glenn is a curator and writer deeply invested in working closely with artists to develop ideas, artworks, and exhibitions that respond to and transform our understanding of the world. Glenn is Senior Curator and Director of Public Art at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Recently, she received substantial critical and community praise for her curatorial work in the groundbreaking exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky titled Promise, Witness, Remembrance. an exhibition that reflected on the life of Breonna Taylor, centered on her portrait painted by Amy Sherald, and was listed on the 2021 Observer Arts Power 50 List.

From 2018-2021, Glenn was Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she shaped how outdoor sculpture activates and engages Crystal Bridges' 120-acre campus. Allison has over a decade of experience in the field. Prior to working at Crystal Bridges, she was the Manager of Publications and Curatorial Associate for Prospect New Orleans’ international art triennial Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. Her writing has been featured in numerous exhibition publications and art periodicals. Her essay in Marshall Brown: Recurrent Visions, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2021) is forthcoming.

Allison received dual master’s degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy, and a Bachelor of Fine Art Photography with a co-major in Urban Studies from Wayne State University in Detroit.