I work on the structural questions at the intersection of arts, culture, and governance — translating complex systems into frameworks that can actually be implemented.
Consultant. Scholar. Practitioner.
My work lives at the intersection of cultural policy, institutional design, and creative-economy research. I'm a consultant and scholar, and I bring both of those identities to the same set of questions: how cultural institutions get built and governed, how creative workers and enterprises are measured and supported by public systems, and how policy moves from analysis into implementation.
What draws me to this work is the gap between how cultural systems actually function and how policy tends to describe them. The creative economy spans nonprofit, for-profit, and hybrid organizational forms; produces both public and private value; and depends on workers whose labor is often invisible to the data systems designed to support them. Arts and cultural institutions sit at the intersection of civic life, economic development, and community identity — yet they're frequently under-resourced, under-measured, and governed by structures that don't fit their actual complexity. Getting that picture right — analytically, institutionally, and politically — is what I find most interesting, and most useful.
As a consultant, I work on projects that require both research depth and implementation fluency. Recent engagements include leading the feasibility study and operational model development for the City of Emeryville's Arts and Cultural Center, resulting in a hybrid city-nonprofit governance recommendation adopted by unanimous vote of the full City Council; developing a new analytical framework for measuring California's creative workforce for a statewide report commissioned through Californians for the Arts; co-authoring an implementation toolkit for AB812, California's new low-income artist housing legislation; legislative analysis and policy recommendations for California Arts Advocates; cultural policy advisory for the City of Oakland; and economic research for the California 100 Initiative
I hold a Master of Public Affairs from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, where I have taught Arts and Cultural Policy. My independent research examines how artistic practices function as tools of political cognition and governance — how arts and culture shape the ways communities think, deliberate, and build collective life. This work is currently in development as a doctoral project, building on published research in the Journal of Public Affairs Education and other venues.
Before graduate school, I spent two decades in the field — training as a performer and director at the Moscow Art Theater School, working as an applied theater artist across the US, UK, and China, and serving as Executive Director of the Teaching Artists Guild, where I led the organization's growth from a local nonprofit into a national presence. That combination of artistic practice, organizational leadership, and policy research is not incidental to how I consult — it's the foundation of it.
