Schedule & Program

As the arts Program Director at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ben Cameron supervises a $13 million grant program focused on artists and organizations in the theater, dance, jazz and presenting fields. Previously, he served as executive director of Theatre Communications Group, senior program officer at the Dayton Hudson Foundation, manager of community relations for Target and director of the theater program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Cameron is also an avid cyclist, having twice ridden from Minneapolis to Chicago to raise money for AIDS relief.

Retha Cilliers is CEO of the Field Band Foundation that works at the grassroots level in South Africa to contribute to the education and development of underprivileged communities through organizing field bands. Cilliers began her career as a musician playing bassoon for the Pact Orchestra, the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1997, she became the manager of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra where she was instrumental in developing the group’s educational programming to bring music to disadvantaged communities.

Carol Coletta is the director of ArtPlace, a new national initiative to accelerate creative placemaking across the U.S. through a collaboration of the nation’s top foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Coletta has long been an advocate for cities and creative communities as former CEO of CEOs for Cities and host of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City.

Kristy Edmunds is the new executive and artistic director of UCLA Live. Previously, she lived in Australia and served as artistic director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival for four years and was deputy dean for the School of Performing Arts for the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. While abroad, Edmunds also served as consulting artistic director for the Park Avenue Armory in New York, a new visual and performing arts space.

When Harvard Kennedy School graduate John Fetterman moved to Braddock, Pa., in 2001, he planned to help dropouts get their GEDs. Once a thriving industrial community, Braddock was also a dropout of sorts with its shattered population. Fetterman’s mission quickly became threefold: improve the quality of life for the young people, draw the energy of creative communities and subvert the construction of an expressway through the middle of town. Fetterman has attracted the attention of small struggling communities across the country and has been a featured speaker of the TED Talks and interviewed by 60 Minutes.

John Hearn, a principal at SYPartners, works with leaders to invent their organizations’ futures, guiding them through transformations of strategy, culture and innovation. He has collaborated with clients as varied as AT&T, Blackstone, Celgene, Citi, eBay, JPMorgan, PepsiCo, NCR and Sara Lee. Previously, Hearn worked as a corporate strategist, venture investor and technology entrepreneur. He has helped launch privatization mutual funds in the newly-liberated Czech Republic, one of the first desktop apps in the portal-saturated Web, fraud-detecting equity research in the wake of accounting scandals, and recommendation technology in the nascent digital music industry.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph has been named one of America’s Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences by Smithsonian Magazine. As a performance artist, he has toured his productions worldwide, and his newest project Red, Black and Green: A Blues, about the eco-equity movement toward green collar jobs in black neighborhoods, garnered rave reviews. He is a frequent commentator on NPR, mentors young writers through the Youth Speaks program and has taught at Stanford University, Lehigh University, Mills College and the University of Wisconsin.

John Kani is a South African actor, director, and playwright. He has performed in many productions at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, including Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, which he co-wrote with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. These two productions won Kani the 1975 Tony Award for best actor and best play. Recently, Kani directed the Market Theatre’s production of The Meeting by Jeff Stetson and wrote and starred in the play Nothing but the Truth. He has been in many films including the upcoming Coriolanus.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator, and speaker. Her aesthetic approach spans the range from abstract to personal to political, while her working process emphasizes research, translation between artistic media and intensive collaboration with dancers, communities and thinkers from diverse disciplines. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance – before handing over the executive leadership to a new generation in 2011. Lerman is currently pursuing new projects, including her current artist-in-residence post at Harvard University.