BIOGRAPHIES OF THOSE WHO WILL WORK ON THE MOSAIC EVALUATION
Drs. Thomas and Dennis Wolf will lead this evaluation.
- Dr. Dennie Wolf is one of the leading arts education researchers and evaluators in the United States. She holds a doctorate from Harvard where she served as a researcher at Project Zero for more than a decade and then headed Harvard PACE, an initiative linking schools and external partners in new approaches to assessing student learning. She led studies on the early development of artistic and symbolic capacities and later focused on design, implementation, and evaluation strategies that help cultural organizations and communities examine and improve how people gain access to learning, culture, and creativity both in and outside of formal institutions. Nationally, Wolf has helped a number of city-wide and regional consortia build coordinated systems that support critical and creative learning for young people in and out of school time, in cities as varied as Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Portland, OR. Based on this work, Wolf conducted a strategic review of all aspects of arts education for the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a three-term appointee to the National Assessment Governing Board, the federal agency that measures student learning nationally. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, the Buck, Arnold, Carnegie, Mellon, Spencer, and William Penn foundations, and has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and books.
- Dr. Thomas Wolf was founding director of the New England Foundation for the Arts and he has had a varied career as a professional musician, an educator, and a consultant. With a doctorate from Harvard where he taught for many years, he has written extensively on nonprofit management and governance including a best-selling textbook. He has consulted for many of the country’s largest foundations and has advised major cities on efforts to develop more inclusive approaches to cultural planning, programming, and funding. His popular on-line courses for Philanthropy University (affiliated with Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley) have been built upon innovative approaches to reach organizations and individuals representing ALAANA populations and working in community settings with scarce resources around the world. Wolf led the multi-year Arts Forward Fund evaluation on behalf of 36 New York-based funders as well as the ten-year evaluation of the Magic of Music for the Knight Foundation. A recent project for Play on Philly provided strategic planning assistance that resulted in a major increase in funding for this organization serving primarily African Americans.
Additional consultants will include the following:
- Eun Lee is Executive Director & Founder of The Dream Unfinished (http://thedreamunfinished.org), an Activist Orchestra which uses classical music as a platform to engage audiences in dialogues surrounding social and racial justice. For three years she served as Associate Director of Youth Programs for Orchestra of St. Lukes and has recently been appointed to the staff of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.
- Jeannette Rodríguez-Piñeda, Independent Photographer and Teaching Artist, designs and implements residencies for young people at museums and studios throughout NYC including the Queens Museum, the Studio Museum, the Whitney, Groundswell, and others. She is the lead author on a forthcoming AFTA publication on The Arts for Change series that focuses on creative youth development in informal community settings. Her practice “hacks” and re-invents traditional activities like studio classes, field trips, and exhibitions of young artists’ work to give students’ ownership of artistic capital that is rarely shared with them.
- Sonnet Takahisa has developed programs at Boston Children’s Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and the National 9/11 Memorial Museum. She serves on review panels, task forces, boards, and as a consultant to museums, arts organizations, schools, after-school and community-based programs, and funders. Throughout her career she has focused on public engagement, community building, and education reform. She is currently Director of Strategic Education Initiatives at the Newark Museum (https://www.newarkmuseum.org/).
- Stanford Thompson, Founder and CEO of Play on Philly! (http://www.playonphilly.org), an innovative nonprofit that delivers daily, high-quality music education to at-risk youth in Philadelphia, has consulted for the Knight Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America among others. A TED Fellow and Fellow of the Aspen Ideas Festival, he received the Medal of Excellence from the Sphinx Organization and was the Founding Chairman of El Sistema USA. He has been honored by both Kappa Alpha Psi and the Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color.