The Future(s) of Arts Entrepreneurship Education: Models to Prepare Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Careers

How can university arts entrepreneurship programs prepare students to craft fulfilling, multi-faceted careers amid rapidly evolving artistic, political and economic realities? What curricular and co-curricular models have proven successful–and which ones haven’t? A panel of leading scholars and practitioners will discuss the current landscape of the field–and discuss what comes next.

Wen Guo and David McGraw will begin the session with a brief presentation of the findings from their paper, “Stepping Outside the Classroom: Connecting Contextual Factors’ of American Universities and Arts Alumni’s Entrepreneurial Intentions,” from the recently published book Innovating Institutions and Inequities in the Arts (ed. Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan). They will share their research drawing on SNAAP data to investigate the ways in which higher education arts entrepreneurship programs impacts choices of self-reliant careers for arts alumni of different racial and economic backgrounds.

Then, leaders from four top arts entrepreneurship programs–the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida, the Center for Creative Economies at The University of Texas at Austin, the EXCEL Lab at the University of Michigan, and the Music Business & Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Florida–will respond to Guo and McGraw’s work and share their distinctive models for arts entrepreneurship education in and outside the curriculum and spanning pedagogy and research.