Presenter

Douglas McLennan

Editor, ArtsJournal

Douglas McLennan is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.com, the largest aggregator of arts and cultural news on the internet. Founded in 1999, ArtsJournal attracts more than 50,000 visitors a day, and is home to some 60 bloggers.

As a journalist, Mr. McLennan’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the London Evening Standard, Symphony Magazine and many others. He has been a music critic and arts reporter for NPR, Salon, Seattle Weekly, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Other projects include: designing a major new arts festival for Miami, digital media and audience strategy for Spring For Music at Carnegie Hall and the Ojai Music Festival, consulting for numerous arts organizations, including the Chicago Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Musical America, New Music America Boston Court Theatre, Boston Lyric Opera, and others.

For eight years Mr. McLennan taught at the Annenberg School for Journalism & Communications at the University of Southern California. He has also been a visiting professor in arts management at The Peter Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University. He has taught at the NEA’s Fellowship Programs in Arts Journalism: in theatre at USC, in classical music at Columbia University, and in dance at Duke University. He has also conducted numerous seminars for DanceUSA, the League of American Orchestras, Americans for the Arts, and Opera America, and has given keynote addresses at the conferences of the League of American Orchestras, Opera America, the Theatre Communications Group, Chamber Music America and the Music Critics Association.

As a speaker on digital strategies and audience behavior he has delivered hundreds of keynotes around the world – from Mongolia to Salzburg, Spain and Dubai. In the US, he is a frequent speaker and keynoter at universities and conferences across the country.

He is a former director of the National Arts Journalism Program and has worked with numerous arts foundations and funders. He’s twice been a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes and was chairman of the press jury for the Van Cliburn Amateur Piano Competition. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School and in 2005 was named one of the school’s Top 100 graduates for the school’s 100th anniversary.