Photo: Kenneth Leftridge
For Sam Brown ’23, art is life—and she wants everyone to be able to experience it.Moving from Florida to Ohio to attend Oberlin College in 2010, she earned a BA in Africana Studies with a minor in dance—complete with a capstone project in hip-hop dance. After graduation, she came to Chicago to be part of the city’s thriving arts scene and found her first arts industry job at The Promontory, a music venue on Chicago’s South Side, where she served as a curator, event producer, and production staff member. “Each week, I was spotlighting up-and-coming local talent from the neighborhood,” she explains, “and giving particularly underrepresented artists the opportunity to perform and have a platform. As I got more into curation, I fell in love.” She continued in that role until she had the chance to dive deeper into the nonprofit world, working with AileyCamp Chicago as a camp administrator for this transformative summer program to serve middle-school students on Chicago’s West Side. She served as their mentor, helped them build self-esteem, and exposed them to different forms of dance. Through her work at AileyCamp Chicago, she became familiar with Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, a nonprofit that reimagines and diversifies the aesthetics of contemporary dance by uniting modern, classical, American, and African-American traditions in dance and storytelling. To help the theater cultivate a creative community dedicated to nurturing artists, she joined its team as a dance education manager and executive assistant in 2018. “My positions and relationships at Deeply Rooted really got me passionate about leadership, how I want to lead, and how I can help strengthen nonprofit organizations,” she explains. “Through my experiences, I’ve been able to see funding disparities in the philanthropic world, and the struggle to keep certain nonprofit organizations that are doing great work for the community on their
feet, even when they don’t always have the best support. I want to help change that.” As she made her mark in the community, Northwestern’s MS in Leadership for Creative Enterprises (MSLCE) program was always in the back of her mind. She’d known about it for years, and it seemed like a good fit, but she never found time for graduate school—until a life-altering event encouraged her to reconsider. As Brown took care of her father after an unexpected surgery, she realized: There’s no time like the present. She decided to step away from full-time work and focus on earning a master’s degree that would help her build the skills she needed to either return to the nonprofit space in a director-level position to impact visioning and programming—or step out on her own. “The program was calling to me,” she says. “I’ve always been a multidisciplinary person, never focused on just one area of interest within the arts. This program provides so much room to explore various arts disciplines, course topics, and curricular opportunities. It felt like Cinderella finding her glass slipper.” Even though she has more than a decade of work experience in the arts sector, she says the program gives her a framework and context to better understand and explain many of the situations she’s encountered in her professional life. (In)Equity in Arts and Entertainment: History + Practice, led by Evolution Management Consultants Cofounder and Partner Al Heartley, and Business Models, taught by Clinical Assistant Professor Allison Henry, were both lightbulb moments for Brown. The class discussions and assignments helped her realize why some of her former employers struggled with organizational structure and other business challenges. Completing a case study on Chicago Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois Weisberg as part of Professor Noshir Contractor’s Leveraging Networks in Creative Enterprises course also opened her eyes to new career paths. “Hearing about a Jewish woman like myself who was such a powerhouse and connector in the arts community doing such great work to provide free arts opportunities to the Chicagoland area gave me new insight into my future possibilities, including doing more arts advocacy work for organizations like DCASE [City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events] and Arts Alliance Illinois,” she says. While Brown isn’t yet sure where her MSLCE degree will lead, she knows this: She’ll be prepared to work as a leader who makes it easier for everyone to access arts resources and events. “Whether it’s for another nonprofit or an organization I launch on my own, I want to create more equitable compensation for underrepresented artists in their mediums,” she explains. “I want to help artists grow and be the best versions of themselves. I’m beyond excited to keep applying all the things I’m learning to creating new opportunities and spaces.”
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