With over seventeen years’ experience as an advocate and cultural expert, in urban and rural settings, Bridget creates and curates the engagement tools that connect with a community’s true identity first, so creativity and transformation thrives; and projects result in civic good. She senses the heart, soul, and signature of a community with instinct, professional insights, and (infectious) passion.
Bridget approaches projects as a thoughtful implementer and convener of multiple points of view. She inspires individuals to become advocates of the greater agenda, creating consensus to be part of a movement together – whether the need is transforming institutional culture, introducing a fresh aesthetic, or leading innovative audience and community development initiatives.
Bridget creates social and cultural awareness with experience and artistic excellence know-how; she works from a canon of all seven lively arts disciplines in both the performing and visual artists — combined with conflict management (CM) and Systems Design tools that affect change.
Bridget served as a U.S. cultural policy maker as a partner for the National Dance Project for the New England Foundation for the Arts and as a contributor to PRI, U.S. Production Residency Initiative funded by Andrew Mellon and Doris Duke Charitable Foundations, and as a guest Presenter to numerous international festivals and consulates; including the U.S. delegation appointment for the International Tanzmesse in Dusseldorf, Germany supported by U.S. Counsel General Germany. She was guest performance curator at the FRIST Center for the Visual Arts (www.fristcenter.org), Nashville for the mid-career retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems, Three Decades of Photography and Video, on a final tour stop to the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Both performing artists and Weems were subsequent MacArthur Genius Fellows the following year.
Bridget holds a Master of Management in non-profit’s (MMN), from Lipscomb University Business School, and is a Tennessee Civil Mediator (Supreme Court Rule 31). She works as an independent consultant at livingartsplusideas.com llc, and for Kensington Digital Media as a marketing consultant in Nashville, Tennessee designing multi-channel campaigns and creative.
Bridget builds new individual and organizational confidence and purpose, elevating teams in a department to the next level, strategically re-positioning the organization, because the vision is realized. Bridget facilitated diversity and inclusivity for the southern United States as founding arts education director for the Bologna Performing Arts Center. Her department implemented six initiatives from healthcare to mounting a functional Governor’s School for the Arts, and operated as a field office to the state arts commission (now patented DoEd.,) school reform project, in addition to co-commissioning touring works. Her office centrally contributed to the Center receiving the Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts for Cultural Leadership, capturing the first recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts for the region. At Vanderbilt University, Bridget served as a cultural liaison and policy maker, as producer and presenter of the university’s performing and speaker’s series in addition to directing a contemporary art gallery shepherding museum education. Among a myriad of initiatives in her thirteen years of service; as a fundraiser she secured the necessary resources to sustain cultural opportunities for systemic change; introducing integrated and innovative approaches to traditional models which resulted in the reversal of a financial deficit in one fiscal year, introducing tiered corporate sponsorship to serve company capacity, instituting a statewide ticket initiative, for public and private higher Ed., populations, and laid the groundwork for incubated month long artist residency work in multiple non-affiliated art sectors.
She consults here!
Bridget Kohnhorst
bridgette.kohnhorst@gmail.com
(O)615.497.6594
