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Garth Ross is co-founder of SkateFolk, producing skateboarding competitions, festivals, media, and venues. Mr. Ross is a creator, producer, administrator, and educator with over 25 years of experience in arts and media. He recently started up the Schwarzman Center at Yale University (YSC), a new center for arts and student life where he served as founding Executive Director from 2017-2021. At YSC he leveraged dining, social, and artistic activity – onsite, online, and in the community - to encourage creativity, self-expression, and social cohesion among the campus and the public. Prior to his work at Yale, Mr. Ross served as Vice President of Community Engagement at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. where he spent over twenty years developing strategies for enlarging constituencies and increasing participation in the arts. He has produced over 7,000 live events and performances, films, and digital media experiences in a wide range of genres, featuring artists from all fifty states and around the world. Mr. Ross established the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage daily free performance series, as well as many other projects and festivals including Joyful Sounds: Gospel Across America, Look Both Ways: Street Arts Across America, American Voices with Renée Fleming, One Mic: Hip Hop Culture Worldwide, and Finding a Line: Skateboarding, Music, and Media.
With a focus on cultivating unique, multi-disciplinary collaborations among organizations, artists, and communities, his work illuminates the possibility of compatibility between different cultural viewpoints by including diverse stakeholders in the process of cultural production. He has taught his arts leadership course, “Responsive Arts”, in the Theater Management program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. His chapter entitled “Finding a Line from Fight Club to the Kennedy Center: How We Learned to Cross Invisible Bridges” was published in the book Grassroots Leadership and the Arts for Social Change (Building Leadership Bridges) (2017, Emerald Publishing Limited). Mr. Ross received his B.A. in English literature and music from Connecticut College and is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
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