The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

her third City of Los Angeles Artist in Residency
project at California State Los Angeles, Brazell
is earning her B.A. at Los Angeles City College
and working with the Screen Actors Guild
Foundation as the director of special projects.
Juan Carrillo
Juan Carrillo is a retired arts administrator now
focusing on becoming an art maker. He is a
trustee of WESTAF. For 27 years, he managed
many of the grant programs of the California
Arts Council, serving as deputy director for
most of those years. He has served on numerous
federal, state, and local arts agency
advisory and funding panels and represented
the Arts Council to legislative committees,
state and national conferences, and private
and public advisory bodies. He is a founding
member of several arts groups, including the
Royal Chicano Air Force, an artists’ collective,
and the Center for Contemporary Art in
Sacramento. He also served as a founding
board member of The Association of American
Cultures and the Concilio de Arte Popular.
He enjoys drawing and writing. Carrillo has a
B.A. in American history from the University of
California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree
in education and cultural anthropology from
California State University, Sacramento.
James Early
James Early is the director of cultural heritage
policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C. Since 1984, Early has served
in many positions at the Smithsonian Institution:
assistant provost for educational and cultural
programs, assistant secretary for education and
public service, director of cultural studies and
communications at the Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage Studies, and interim director of
the Anacostia Museum and Center for African
American History and Culture. Prior to his work
with the Smithsonian, Early was a humanist
administrator at the National Endowment for
the Humanities in Washington, D.C; a producer,
writer, and host of Ten Minutes Left, a weekly
radio segment of cultural, educational, and
political interviews and commentary at WHUR
FM radio, Howard University; and a research
associate for programs and documentation
at the Howard University Institute for the
Arts and Humanities in Washington, D.C.
Over the course of a nearly 30-year professional
career, Early has consistently recognized
the integrity of historically evolved values
and cultures of African-American, Latino,
Native-American, and Asian-Pacific-American
communities and investigated and participated
in mediated cultural encounters that inform
national and global policies. The main focus
of his work is cultural democracy policy.
His public service includes board memberships
at the Institute for Policy Studies, the
Democracy Collaborative, Telesur Television,
Fundacion Amistad, The Transnational Institute,
and The Association of American Cultures.
Early holds a B.A. in Spanish from Morehouse
College in Atlanta, Georgia, and completed
graduate work in Latin-American and
Carribean history with a minor in African and
Afro-American history at Howard University.
Nan Elsasser
Nan Elsasser is the founder and executive
director of Working Classroom, Inc. She has a
B.A. in international relations from American
University, an M.A. in secondary education
from the University of New Mexico (UNM), and
is ABD in educational linguistics at UNM. Her
teaching experience includes working with
UNM’s Navajo Teacher Education Project,
the University of Albuquerque, the Institute of
American Indian Arts, and the University of the
Virgin Islands. She received a Fulbright Teaching
Fellowship at the College of the Bahamas
and, in 1994, received a scholarship to the
Executive Program for Non-Profit Leaders–Arts
at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford
University’s Graduate School of Business. Her
work on educational equity has appeared
in Harvard Educational Review, Journal of
Education, College English, Humanities in Society
and the International Journal on the Sociology
of Language, and in Freire for the Classroom
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