Institute for Cultural Entrepreneurship for Museum Leaders

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ICE Faculty
	Mary Case is a founding director of Qm². Mary consults with boards and senior staff on leadership issues to improve decision making and strategic initiatives and execution. Her focused work in museums include staff and board coaching, meeting design and faciliation, strategy development and execution, and executive roundtable leadership.
	Philip Morris is the CEO of Proctor’s, the performing arts center of the Capital District in Schenectady, NY. Over the past six years Proctor’s has raised and invested nearly 40 million dollars to expand its stage, add a 3-D Giant Screen facility, expand public spaces, create conference facilities and build a central heating and chilling plant that supplies 4 neighbor buildings with utilities and heats the snowmelt system under the sidewalks around Proctors' block, saving money and substantially reducing the carbon footprint of the buildings involved. Proctor’s has been at the center of downtown Schenectady's redevelopment and is now open nearly every day of the year with music, theater, dance, films, conventions and meetings, community activities and major Broadway performances. Morris sees the Proctor’s enterprise and the community as co-beneficiaries of the theatre's presence. Mr. Morris has a B.A. in History and Music from Hamilton College and lives in the Stockade neighborhood of Schenectady, the oldest continuously occupied residential neighborhood in the country.
	Pam Green is executive director of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Weeksville Heritage Center. SDating from the 1840s, Weeksville historic site is the remnants of a 19th-century free black community. Green, who has an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's in Mathematics from Fisk University, is responsible for the management and expansion of the historic African American organization. Ms. Green’s primary responsibilities include managing the complete restoration of four historic houses, strategic planning, fundraising, and implementing new educational and cultural programs. She is expanding the reach of the organization within the immediate neighborhood as well as outside of it. She serves on the Boards of the Association of African American Museums, Community Resource Exchange, and the Museum Association of New York. She lives in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
	Anne W. Ackerson is director of the Museum Association of New York (MANY), a member-based, nationally recognized state museum association committed to strengthening the organizational development of the state’s diverse museum and heritage organization communities. Ackerson also is the co-editor of a series of MANY publications dealing with the importance of mission, corporate philanthropy, and hiring and retaining excellent employees and volunteers. Beginning in 2005, MANY turned its attention to next-generation leadership needs of museums in the state. That research effort led to a white paper and subsequent research on succession planning in the state’s museums. A white paper on succession planning was published in 2008. Two of MANY's board members, Pamela E. Green and Gretchen Sorin, also read the paper and recognized a need to start a mid-career leadership training program for professionals who can take the helm at museums as boomers retire. Together, the three sowed the seeds for creation of the Institute for Cultural Entrepreneurship, dedicated to training mid-career cultural professionals. Ackerson also is co-authoring a book on history museum leadership for AltaMira Press under the American Association for State and Local History imprint that will be published in 2013. She also has served as director of several historic house museums and historical societies in central and eastern New York. At ICE, Anne presents on exploring ways to develop an entrepreneurial board and leads discussion and exercises on how to prepare your co-workers to be part of the entrepreneurial process.
	The Institute for Cultural Entrepreneurship welcomed Ruth Abram to the speakers program for ICE 2012. Abram, founding president of New York City'sLower East Side Tenement Museum, provided a case study in entrepreneurship. The museum, at 97 Orchard St., once contained 22 apartments and a basement level saloon. Its exhibits include restored apartments that depict the lives of immigrants. An activist turned historian, Abram has graduate degrees in social welfare and American history and has pioneered the use of history to address social issues. The museum, housed in an original 1863 tenement that was home to thousands of poor, urban immigrants until 1935, strives to help today's visitors understand the day-to-day issues newcomers faced - then and now. The American Association of Museums has described the Tenement Museum as "virtually alone among American museums in its focus on the housing and lives of urban working class people. It is alone as a museum of tenement life." (It) is an "extraordinary achievement."
	Much like his nonprofit Waterfire has become a signature cultural asset in Providence, R.I., Barnaby Evans' keynote speech at ICE is a headliner. Evans returns for a third year at the institute 2012 where he'll describe how he orchestrates a combination of water, fire and music in staged evening events that draw large crowds of locals and visitors to Providence's revived downtown. Waterfire has turned Providence into an event place much like New Orleans is synonymous with Mardi Gras or San Francisco with Chinese New Year. Evans works in site-specific sculpture installations that ignite 100 floating, moored braziers - steel-lattice containers shaped like three-foot-high martini glasses - in the three rivers of Providence and create a crowd-pleasing spectacle. Attendance has reached more than 100,000 at some midsummer lightings. Evans will talk about how he grew Waterfire from a small, one-time event in 1994 to a civic institution with 20 employees, hundreds of loyal volunteers and a $1.6 million annual budget that comes from seasonal, corporate and individual sponsors. Evans also ends his talk with a special mood-setting event that stays with ICE participants long after institute comes to a close.
	Gretchen Sullivan Sorin is director and distinguished professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program. She has worked for more than 200 museums as historian, exhibition curator, strategic and interpretive planner, and she writes about African American history and art. Major exhibitions and catalogues include: Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews for the Jewish Museum in New York City, and Freedoms’ Journals for the New York Public Library. Sorin is the author of Touring Historic Harlem: Four Walks in Northern Manhattan with Andrew Dolkart. Sorin collaborated with MANY Director Anne Ackerson and Pamela Green in creating the Institute for Cultural Entrepreneurship which uses team-building skills, case studies and dynamic presenters to teach participants how to approach challenges in attaining their professional goals. In addition to being the director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program, where she also teaches classes in museum education, exhibitions, and museum administration, she is Adjunct Professor of Public History at the University at Albany. Sorin is the recipient of two SUNY Chancellor’s awards. She serves as a Trustee of the 1772 Foundation, a philanthropic foundation committed to supporting historic preservation and agricultural sustainability. She has a Bachelor’s from Douglass College, Rutgers University, a master’s in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, and a Ph.D. in History from the University at Albany.
	Lisa M. Christopher is the principal at LMChristopher & Associates, a heritage marketing firm in Camas, Wa. Her varied professional experiences center on internal and external communications, heritage-based media and grant and feasibility study writing for museums and historic sites in the Northwest and Mid-Atlantic. Lisa has a bachelor's degree in English/Communications and a master's in American Studies. She has worked as a newspaper reporter/editor and taught marketing and public relations as a college adjunct. Since 1996, she’s dovetailed her media skills and history degree into Heritage Marketing consultation. She serves on the Marketing and Public Relations Committee at Fort Vancouver National Trust, in Vancouver, Wa., and as a member of the Board of Directors for the Willamette Falls Heritage Area Coalition, in Oregon City, Oregon. Lisa has bee involved with ICE in varying capacities. She was an ICE attendee for the 2010 inaugural year. She had such a rewarding experience that she was happy to oblige in 2011 when asked to present on how to market your museum or historic site. She's also responsible for ICE marketing, its social media pages on Facebook and Twitter and ICE e-newsletters and e-communications. She became ICE Program Coordinator in 2012.