Meet our Keynote Speaker

Dr. Linda Essig

Dr. Linda Essig is Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs for Baruch College of the City University of New York. She was previously Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at California State University Los Angeles, director of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Programs for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and founding director of its School of Theatre and Film. In 2011, she founded Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, the first peer-reviewed academic journal on arts entrepreneurship, now published by the University of Arkansas Press. Her research has been published there as well as in Cultural Trends, Entrepreneurship Research Journal, Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, Theatre Topics, Stage Directions, Theatre Design and Technology, and elsewhere.  In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of several books on both arts entrepreneurship and lighting design, including most recently Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money and Entrepreneurial Action. She has served on the boards of directors of Self-Help Graphics & Art in Los Angeles, Rising Youth Theatre in Phoenix, and currently serves on the board of the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, a national NGO. She holds BFA and MFA degrees in theatre design from NYU and a PhD in Public Administration and Policy from Arizona State University.