Systemic Inspiration and the Politics of Joy

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is one of the co-architects of The Creative Ecosystem, an organizing model and creative arts incubator that fosters unconventional collaborations in civic context. His design is a bi-product of his dual roles as one of the Vice Presidents of the Kennedy Center and an award-winning librettist with active commissions at the LA Philharmonic, the Albany Symphony, and Lincoln Center. As Vice President of Social Impact, Joseph is currently and successfully moving The Kennedy Center from an engagement model to an empowerment model as the institution seeks to be in better compliance with an anti-racist agenda. During his plenary, Joseph will lay out a blueprint for how Levitt grantees and their partners might consider a paradigm of “structural allyship” to expand audiences, combat apathy, and build community. Joseph offers candor, tools, difficult questions, a poet’s delivery, and an executive’s sense of the organizational stakes during this dynamic keynote.