Members of the Brown University Community

We’re delighted to announce the appointment of Avery Willis Hoffman as the inaugural artistic director of the Brown Arts Initiative (BAI). Currently program director at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, Avery will begin part time at Brown on November 2, 2020, transitioning to full time in 2021. This appointment follows an extensive international search directed by a faculty search committee that was chaired by President Christina Paxson.

Reporting directly to the provost, Avery will be responsible for curating arts programming in the Granoff Center and the Performing Arts Center, including work by students, faculty and external artists and organizations. In this role, she will collaborate closely with Brown arts departments, Trinity Repertory Company and other cultural and institutional partners, such as the Rhode Island School of Design, to build the visibility and quality of arts programming at the University. Together with BAI Faculty Director Thalia Field, Avery will co-chair the BAI Executive Committee, and promote alumni engagement as well as fundraising for BAI.

A writer, director, producer and curator of public programs, Avery brings a depth of experience to the role of artistic director. In her current role as inaugural program director at Park Avenue Armory in New York, Avery has curated and produced innovative and diverse public programming initiatives, including numerous large- and small-scale cultural events: Artist and Curatorial Talks; a Confrontational Comedy Series (2016-2019); the annual Culture in a Changing America Symposium (2017-2020); Carrie Mae Weems’s Shape of Things Salon (2017); the United Lenape Nations’ first Manhattan-based Pow Wow (2018); Theaster Gates’s Black Artist Retreat 2019; and the recent multi-partner digital initiative 100 Years | 100 Women, marking the centennial of the 19^th Amendment (2020).

Prior to the Armory, Avery was a senior project developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm, where she conducted research and developed content for a number of special projects. Between 2010 and 2015, her primary project was the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C.

For more than a decade, Avery’s professional career has included multiple projects with acclaimed director Peter Sellars, including his international productions of Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s opera Zaide, New Crowned Hope Festival, and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona. She is currently international tour producer for FLEXN, Sellars’s collaboration with choreographer Reggie Gray and the Brooklyn flex community, which premiered at the Armory in March 2015 and has since been presented at the Marseille Festival, Napoli Teatro Festival, Holland Festival, New Zealand Festival, Sao Paolo Brasil Sesc, La Villette Paris, Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, residencies at Dartmouth College and Princeton University, and The Kennedy Center.

Avery earned her DPhil and MSt in Classical languages and literature from Balliol College, University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and earned her BA in Classics and English at Stanford University.

We would like to extend thanks to the following members of the search committee who participated in this successful recruitment:

• Karen Allen Baxter, Managing Director, Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre
• Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture and Media
• Emily Dolan, Associate Professor and Chair of Music
• Thalia Field, Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing, Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Initiative
• Ramell Ross, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts
• Patricia Ybarra, Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

Please join us in welcoming Avery Willis Hoffman to the Brown University community. We look forward to working with her to harness the University’s tremendous strengths across and beyond the University’s arts departments, and to position BAI to offer valuable contributions to the arts and society through education, research and programming.

Sincerely,

Christina H. Paxson, President           Richard M. Locke, Provost