With over a decade of experience as a researcher and consultant at WolfBrown, now serving in the role of Principal, John has a deep passion for understanding, engaging, and supporting creative communities. His work for government agencies, private foundations, and arts nonprofits focuses on cultural policy, systemic approaches to artist support, program strategy, and impact evaluation.
John’s interest in arts funding and cultural ecosystems spans back to his doctoral research on the history of government subsidies for theaters in Germany. At WolfBrown, he has explored how creatives are sustaining themselves in the greater St. Louis region post-pandemic, examined inequities in the arts funding ecosystem in California for the California Arts Council, and conducted a survey of Film and Media Makers in the San Francisco Bay Area that was cited in city council meetings that led to the introduction of Oakland’s film tax credit. Other research on cultural ecosystems includes a Needs Assessment of artists and other creatives in Austin, Texas (City of Austin, Cultural Arts Division) and an extensive examination of Northwest Arkansas’ cultural infrastructure (Walton Family Foundation).
In the evaluation space, John has developed particular expertise in designing, facilitating, and training grantees to participate in decentralized evaluation processes. The evaluation of the Federation of State Humanities Councils’ Why It Matters program, which sought to increase civic engagement through public humanities programming, included a series of webinars and working groups on specific research methods, designed to strengthen grant recipients’ ability to gather and use evaluation data effectively. John’s evaluation of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ Building Bridges program (fostering intercultural understanding through artist residencies on US college campuses) hinged on supporting grantees in working with locally recruited research fellows to inform an overarching program-level assessment. Other notable evaluation projects include South Arts’s Jazz Road program (an artist-centered touring and residency program), the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s US Artists International program (which supports US-based artists attending international Arts Festivals abroad), and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s Open Spaces program (supporting community-based temporary public art projects).
To inform organization-wide evaluation strategies, John created a multi-year evaluation plan for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s Arts Program, contributed to a Qualitative Impact Framework for the Canada Council for the Arts, and developed a long-term plan to build capacity for evaluation and impact assessment among State Humanities Councils, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
John often works closely with clients to develop highly customized research plans that shed light on audience behavior or address specific strategic questions. On the national level, he worked with the Digital Marketing firm Capacity Interactive to design a longitudinal survey of media usage habits among performing arts ticket buyers, and segmented audience attitudes towards new plays for Theatre Development Fund and Theatre Bay Area. Examples of projects for individual cultural institutions include a visitor engagement and prospect segmentation study for the Chicago History Museum and testing the salience of fundraising messages among Cal Performances’s ticket buyers and subscribers.
As a facilitator, John frequently works with philanthropies and service organizations to support peer learning among cohorts of grant recipients. Clients have included the Wallace Foundation (Building Audiences for Sustainability), the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (Building Demand for the Arts), and the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (Building Bridges).
John studied English and Dramatic Art at UC Santa Barbara, and holds an Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University. As a graduate student he designed and taught several upper-level courses, including “The Economics of the Performing Arts” and “Organizational Structures and Production Processes in Contemporary US Theater.” John lives in Alameda, California. He can be reached directly via email.
