Connecting People and Places: Creative Placemaking in Downtown Providence

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 5:30PM - 7:00PM

A conversation about place, space, culture, and community: learn about creative projects -- in Providence and beyond -- that use history, art, and culture to shape neighborhoods and animate public spaces

Presented by Stephanie Fortunato, Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, City of Providence; Anne Valk, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage


Stephanie P. Fortunato is the Deputy Director of Providence's Department of Art, Culture + Tourism. Her work focuses on the City’s cultural policy and creative placemaking projects. She manages projects related to the implementation of the Creative Providence cultural plan, partnerships, and the administration of research studies about Providence’s creative sector. In addition, Ms. Fortunato manages the Gallery at City Hall. She has worked on projects for several cultural organizations including the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and the Rhode Island Historical Society. She co-directed the June 2007 Rhode Island StoryCorps residency. Previously, Ms. Fortunato was director of programs for The Pawtucket Foundation, a civic organization that aims to catalyze area prosperity, and consultant for Jane Clark Chermayeff Associates LLC, a museum-consulting firm specializing in family programming. Ms. Fortunato began her career on Long Island working for the Huntington Arts Council and as curator of a local history museum. She is on the Board of the Pawtucket Citizens Development Corporation and volunteers with The Hive Archive, a feminist art collective. She received her M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University and a B.A. in Humanities from Providence College.

Anne Valk is associate director for programs of the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University, where she coordinates the Fox Point Oral History Project. She recently published a collection of oral history interviews, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Jim Crow South, using interviews housed at Duke University. Her research interests include oral history, local history, women’s history, and African American history, as well as examining experiences of immigration, industrialization and deindustrialization, and racial segregation. Valk is co-principal investigator for Imagining America’s Public Humanities Centers and Institutes Collabotatory.

Brown University, Continuing Education, 200 Dyer Street, Room 101, Providence, RI