Inspiring Creativity in the Next Generation
Emily Hooper Lansana appointed Senior Director of Logan Center Community Arts
Emily Hooper Lansana, Senior Director of Logan Center Community Arts.
On April 29, 2021 the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts announced the appointment of Emily Hooper Lansana as Senior Director of Community Arts.
“Emily’s dynamic leadership has made the Logan Center a place of creative inspiration for youth, and an important home for some of the South Side’s and Chicago’s most dynamic artists and arts organizations,” said Bill Michel, Associate Provost and Executive Director of UChicago Arts and the Logan Center. “The partnerships she cultivates contribute immensely to the cultural vibrancy of the University and the South Side, and we’re proud of her work and leadership at the Logan Center.”
Hooper Lansana joined the University in January 2012 as Community Partnerships Manager for the soon-to-open Logan Center and the newly established Arts + Public Life, where she worked closely with artist and professor Theaster Gates to launch the initiative. Her numerous contributions during her tenure at Arts + Public Life included the establishment of the initiative’s Artist-in-Residence program in partnership with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the inauguration of the Artists Live series which engages a diverse range of artists, at different stages in their careers, in an intimate dialogue about their personal and professional paths.
“Emily quickly developed our programming, and then went from Arts + Public Life and grew into a kind of artist-at-large at the University,” reflected Gates. “And she is still killing it. She stood steadfast on integrity, giving me integrity, and giving integrity to the initiative.”
Over the last nine years, Hooper Lansana has played a pivotal role in developing the Logan Center’s Community Arts program and informing UChicago’s broader arts engagement strategy, most recently in her role as Director of Community Arts at the Logan Center. She now leads a team of deeply invested artists and arts administrators who view the arts as a transformational force to both honor and strengthen communities. With this vision, Logan Center Community Arts has established programs that systematically bring community-driven and partnership-oriented content to the Logan Center’s stages and spaces. These programs include Logan Center Matinees, which offers an annual series of educational and diverse artistic experiences for more than 8,000 students and their teachers in Chicago Public Schools; Family Saturdays, a thematically organized, artist-led series of workshops for children ages 2-12; and Logan Center’s Community Arts Partners, a platform for presentation, programming, and resource-sharing that incorporates 50+ organizations who represent the rich cultural history and vitality of the city of Chicago, especially the South Side.
“I am grateful to work with an incredible team of dedicated leaders,” said Hooper Lansana. “It has been my great honor to celebrate and support artists and arts organizations in the communities where I have lived and raised my family. I am inspired by the legacy and creativity in these neighborhoods and look forward to building even stronger partnerships.”
“...inspired leadership is Emily’s sweet spot, and it’s good to know that she’ll be engaging Chicago South Side artists in this evolved and exciting position.”
—Kevin Iega Jeff, Co-Founder, Creative/Executive Director, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater/Production
Above: Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre, a Logan Center Community Partner and Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project company, performs “Heaven” the Logan Center. (Photo: Michelle Reid/Courtesy of Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre)
Hooper Lansana’s team also supports many of Logan Center’s collaborative projects, such as the Digital Storytelling Initiative, a joint media arts training program of Community Arts, the Jonathan Logan Media Center, and the Community Film Workshop of Chicago, and the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project, a partnership between the Logan Center, eight Chicago-based Black dance companies, and UChicago’s Community Programs Accelerator. This project, supported by The Joyce Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, celebrates the impact of Black dance and provides critical financial and capacity-building support for these legacy companies. Programs such as these have been vital in the Logan Center’s work to honor founding artistic visionaries and cultivate tomorrow’s artists, makers, and cultural consumers.
“We prioritize artistic and cultural engagement that will inspire creativity in the next generation,” said Hooper Lansana.
AfriCOBRA in Chicago reception at the Logan Center Gallery.
The generational impact of the arts has been a key focus for Community Arts under Hooper Lansana’s leadership. With a strong reverence for how cultural history affects the present and informs the future, she has originated programming that speaks directly to Black heritage in the arts and its impact on society. She played a vital programmatic role for the acclaimed AfriCOBRA in Chicago, a 2013 linked series of exhibitions hosted at the Logan Center, the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the South Side Community Art Center that explored the roots and influence of a seminal group of Black South Side artists. More recently, Hooper Lansana established the Legacy Conversation Series, a moderated program of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project that provides a glimpse into the diverse history, culture, and artistic vision of the project’s companies.
The importance to Hooper Lansana of both engaging youth and amplifying their voices has been evident in programs like The Promise of Peace Project: Creating Artistic Platforms for Youth Responses to Living in Communities Confronting Violence, a 2016 project that brought together professional artists and civic leaders to support the artistic voices of youth often absent from contemporary images of American life. The project, a collaboration organized by the Beverly Arts Center, Diasporal Rhythms, the Logan Center, and the South Side Community Arts Center, brought communities from across the South Side of Chicago together to explore violence through the youth perspective and explore how the arts provide a crucial pathway for the future.
Promise of Peace opening exhibition, artwork by Zhana Johnson.
“It has been a pleasure to work with Emily over the years in the development and delivery of innovative, responsive, and impactful programming,” says Leigh Fagin, Logan Center’s Senior Director of Programming and Engagement. “I look forward to continuing to work with Emily on engaging communities of all ages through the consistent building of our network of strong partnerships.”
Hooper Lansana’s expansive cultural network is attributable, in part, to her artistic practice. She is a nationally recognized performance artist who has served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Black Storytellers and as President of the Chicago Association of Black Storytellers. She continues to share her incredible talents as a storyteller with our University and surrounding communities through teaching in UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS), offering workshops and classes, and performing locally and nationally. In 2020, Hooper Lansana was a featured artist in “Artists & Elders: A Bridge, A Gift,” an experimental collaboration between Court Theatre and West Coast-based collective For You that paired ten artists with ten elders for artistic exchange. The Hyde Park Herald highlighted Hooper Lansana’s exchange with writer Shaila Small as “one of the most interesting pairings.”
The success of Logan Center’s collaborative and intricate projects is dependent on mutual cooperation, trust, and respect, values that Hooper Lansana has centered in her work. These values are vital to authentic engagement and the cultural, intellectual, and economic partnerships that Community Arts creates and sustains.
“Leading meaningful collaborative connections across communities requires a depth of experiences and skills,” says Kevin Iega Jeff, Co-Founder, Creative/Executive Director of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater/Productions, “and a process that nurtures collective visioning and professional trust. Such inspired leadership is Emily’s sweet-spot, and it’s good to know that she’ll be engaging Chicago South Side artists in this evolved and exciting position.”
Hooper Lansana’s new role as Senior Director will see an expansion of her work advancing the Logan Center’s community engagement strategy, including the cultivation of cross-campus as well as off-campus partnerships, and increased collaborative responsibility for educational programming such as Amplify, UChicago Arts K-12 Arts Education Initiative presented in partnership with Arts + Public Life, Court Theatre, Logan Center, the Oriental Institute, and the Smart Museum. As an example of the scope of these educational initiatives, Amplify alone serves 24,000 students and teachers from more than 235 Chicago area schools each year.
Emily Hooper Lansana welcomes attendees at a Logan Center Student Matinee.
Most of the Logan Center’s community arts programming is offered free of charge through the generous support of donors that Hooper Lansana has aided in cultivating over the years, such as the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Revada Foundation, and the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation. Recently, Hooper Lansana led the Logan Center’s collaboration with Chicago-based Opportunities for All, which secured multi-year government funding for cooperative educational programming at primarily Black and Latino elementary schools on Chicago’s South East and Northwest Sides. The funds will support professional development for teachers, cultural and community engagement programs for parents, and in-school and afterschool arts programs for students.
“Much of the Logan Center’s impact and partnership in our community is due to Emily’s visionary leadership,” said Michel. “As we approach the ten-year anniversary of the Logan Center, we are fortunate for Emily’s forward-facing vision as the Logan Center continues to provide meaningful artistic collaborations between the University, the South Side, and beyond.”
Prior to joining the University, Emily worked as the Director of Education at Lincoln Center Theater and as Theater and Literary Arts Curriculum Supervisor for Chicago Public Schools. She received her BA in Theater Studies with a certificate in Teacher Preparation/Education from Yale University and an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She recently completed the Executive Program for Emerging Leaders through the Booth School of Business Executive Education.
To learn more about the Logan Center and its programming, visit logancenter.uchicago.edu.