Presenter

Diane Ragsdale

Lecturer, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Diane holds an MFA in acting/directing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is currently a part-time doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she lectured from 2011-2015 for both the cultural economics & entrepreneurship program and the sociology of the arts program. While a lecturer at Erasmus, she taught master- and bachelor-level courses on such topics as the creative economy, creative organizations, arts management, arts marketing, and the organization of art and culture. Her dissertation topic is the evolving relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater in the US over the past 60 years. In 2015 she was visiting guest artist/lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she designed and taught a course on aesthetics and beauty to business majors. Before moving to Europe in 2010, Diane was a program officer for theater and dance at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in NYC and managing director at the contemporary performing arts center, On the Boards (in Seattle). Prior work also includes stints at several film, music, and art festivals.

The past five years, alongside working in academia, Diane has provided a range of consulting and training services to the arts and culture sector; has been a frequent panelist, provocateur, or keynote speaker at arts conferences around the world; and has contributed articles to several trade publications—including “Recreating Fine Arts Institutions,” for the (fall 2009) Stanford Social Innovation Review and “Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy,” published in 2011 by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (the RSA). In 2012, she contributed essays to two books: “Creative Destruction” in Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art (edited by Clayton Lord and published by Theatre Bay Area); and “Producer-Consumer Engagement: The Lessons of Slow Food for the Reflective Arts” in Building Communities, Not Audiences (by Doug Borwick). She also writes a popular arts blog called Jumper, which is published on ArtsJournal.com. For the 2016-2017 academic year she has been appointed Arts Writer in Residence for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.