Office of the Vice President for the Arts

U.S. Cultural Policy Fellows

Exploring the role of cultural strategists in policy and government.

About

The U.S. Cultural Policy Fellows develops the pipeline or supply of cultural strategists at the ready to work in government and other policy-focused organizations, while also increasing the demand for the skills and services that artists and arts workers bring to our complex world.

Fellowships are by nomination only through members of our national advisors.

Leadership

DEBORAH CULLINAN

Co-Investigator

Vice President for the Arts, Stanford University

ADAM BANKS

Principal Investigator

Professor, Graduate School of Education
Professor of African and African American Studies, by courtesy

Faculty Director, Institute for Diversity in the Arts

Current Fellows

A person with long hair smiling at the camera

Photo by Claudia Maturell

SARAH CALDERÓN

Fellow

Bio

Sarah Calderón is the former Executive Director of Creatives Rebuild New York. Previously, Sarah was the Managing Director of ArtPlace America from 2015 to 2020. In this role, Sarah led strategy, finance and operations, management, and grantmaking strategies for higher education. Sarah was the Executive Director of Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education (Bronx, NY) from 2008 to 2015. Before joining Casita, she founded and ran Stickball Printmedia Arts in East Harlem, a printmaking and digital arts organization for youth. Sarah has worked in a variety of roles in arts education policy, as a teaching artist, and in education research and evaluation, including at the NYC Department of Education and MPR Associates Inc. Sarah holds a BFA in printmaking and a BA in psychology from the University of Michigan; and an M.Ed. in arts education policy from Harvard University.

WENDY FEUER

Fellow

Bio

JAMIE HAND

Fellow

Bio

Jamie Hand is a designer, researcher, and cultural strategist with a deep commitment to understanding the forces that shape place-based community transformation. Most recently, she served as Director of Strategic Impact and Narrative Change for Creatives Rebuild New York, where she led large-scale research, policy, advocacy, and communications initiatives that centered artists as workers. From 2014 to 2020, she served as ArtPlace America’s Director of Research Strategies, where she spearheaded cross-sector research and network building efforts to integrate arts and cultural practices into the community development field. Prior to ArtPlace, Jamie worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, where she launched the Our Town grant program, supervised the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, and participated in interagency initiatives ranging from Rebuild by Design and the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, to special projects with the EPA, GSA, State Department, and USDA. Jamie's background in landscape architecture, coupled with her skills as an editor, facilitator, researcher, and designer, reflects a unique blend of rigor and flexibility -- honoring both the linear and the nonlinear, the established and the experimental, the known and the unknown, the logic model and the lived experience.

Artist’s website.

a person with short hair smiling at the camera

Photo by Johana Taylor

AMANDA LOVELEE

Fellow

Bio

Person looking towards camera and smiling

Photo by Matt Stamey

JILL SONKE

Senior Fellow

Bio

Jill Sonke, PhD, is an artist-researcher and cultural strategist. She serves as Director of Research Initiatives and a Research Professor in the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida (UF), Co-director of the EpiArts Lab, a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab in partnership with University College London, and recently served as Director of National Research and Impact for the One Nation/One Project initiative. She serves as an Affiliated Researcher in the WHO’s Jameel Arts & Health Lab and served during the COVID-19 pandemic as a senior advisor to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is an affiliated faculty member in the UF School of Theatre & Dance, the Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, and the Center for African Studies, as well as an editorial board member for Health Promotion Practice journal. Dr. Sonke is a dancer and an amateur musician, a mixed methods researcher with over 100 publications, and has 30+ years of leadership in the field of arts in health. She is the recipient of numerous awards and over 350 grants for her programs and research in the arts and health.

Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida (UF)

EpiArts Lab

Photographer: Derrick Beasley

BENNY STARR

Fellow

Bio

Photo by Laichee Yang courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre

MARCUS YOUNG 楊墨

Fellow

Bio

Marcus Young 楊墨 is a multidisciplinary artist making change in the world through inventing everyday behavioral and awareness practices. He makes work within mindfulness and learning communities, as well as for the stage, museums, government agencies, and the public realm. His teaching focuses on individual and collective well-being, participatory artistic experiences, and cultivating a liberated, artful life.

From 2006 to 2015, he was City Artist in St. Paul. His project Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk transformed the city’s sidewalk maintenance program into a publishing entity for poetry, a work that inspired dozens of other cities to do the same. From 2020 to 2022 he was Artist in Residence for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, one of two programs in the nation placing artists in statewide agencies. There, he created the Land Acknowledgement Confluence Room, re-making a top-floor conference room in the State Transportation Building into a space for broadening awareness around land, body, and place. He is the founding artist for Don’t You Feel It Too?—a 17-year participatory public dance and liberation project.

Public Art Installations

The Gravity of the Sun by Jacob Hashimoto

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U.S. Cultural Policy Fellows

About

Leadership

Current Fellows

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