Karen Chandler Arts and Cultural Management Endowed/Annual Scholarship

Judith Allen is the principal of Nonprofit Specialists, a consulting firm committed to strengthening arts, cultural, educational and other non-profit/service organizations so that they can support the communities they serve through their mission. Ms. Allen has extensive experience in arts, education and hospital administration and currently serves as an adjunct faculty member in Arts Management for the College of Charleston. She has a passion for preparing students for careers in arts management and has been supporting internship stipends during her time as an adjunct member of the program faculty.

In 1993-94, the School of the Arts established the Arts Management minor as an interdisciplinary program in conjunction with the School of Business and Economics. In 1996-97, the Arts Management major became available to students. Karen Chandler began her tenure with the Arts Management Program in 1999 as co-director and expanded the program’s curriculum. She has taught in the undergraduate program, Graduate Arts Management Certificate Program, and has taught arts management in the concentrations in the Masters of Public Administration and MFA in Creative Writing programs. Since 2014, she has served as the program’s Director and Associate Professor of Arts Management. During this time, she launched a series of “firsts” for the program – established the first annual alumni gathering, hired the first tenure-track faculty members of the program (Dr. Kate Keeney and Dr. Jason White), and with Judith Allen, a benefactor and faculty member in the program, established the program’s first endowment named in honor of Scott Shanklin-Peterson, former director of the program and currently its Senior Fellow, and former Senior Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Prior to her appointment at C of C, Chandler served as Assistant Professor of Arts Management at American University in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. in Studies in Arts and Humanities (New York University), M.A. in Music Education (Columbia University-Teachers College), and B.S. in Music Education (Hampton University).

Chandler has directed arts and cultural programs at the African American Cultural Center (University of Virginia), Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (College of Charleston), and is the co-founder/principal of the Charleston Jazz Initiative, a jazz history and research project based in the Arts Management Program. With a National Endowment for the Arts grant, she served as Executive Producer of LEGENDS (2010), a CD with a 22-piece big band of songs by musicians the initiative is studying. Her other publications include articles in the Theatre Management Journal, The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society and JAZZed Magazine. She has completed essays on “Prelude to Gershwin: Edmund Thornton Jenkins” for a Porgy and Bess anthology, and “When Charity and Jazz Meet” (Spoleto Festival USA). She is author of Curtain Up on the Friends: A History of the Friends of the Kennedy Center Volunteer Program.