Herberger Institute’s cultural engine

By Deborah Sussman

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Herberger Institute is the largest comprehensive design and arts college in the country, a cultural village of 6,000 students, staff and faculty who come together at ASU to expand their skills and learn what it means to be artists and designers. But Herberger Institute is also a laboratory space where field partners in a wide range of sectors gather to consider the role of art and design in an increasingly complicated world. The arts and cultural sector is rapidly changing due to audience demographics, technology and cultural consumption patterns. For our Institute to remain relevant, we must engage in broader issues of the field that impact how arts and design are shifting and evolving.

 The National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation is the Institute’s engine for coordinating, administrating and leveraging our national work and making sure that we create long-term impact and visibility in the broader cultural field. The Accelerator’s mission is to identify people and practices that demonstrate the power of art, design and culture to advance public good and create more equitable communities. The Accelerator is designed to elevate and scale important innovations and innovators in arts and culture by creating powerful learning modules and tools via ASU’s global education tech platforms, connecting artists and policy actors from other sectors in use-inspired research and policy, building public media around powerful stories and exemplars and routing this all back to our students, so that they learn to leverage their skills in new and powerful ways.

 2018-19 was dedicated to designing and building this powerful new model. We assembled a national leadership team, led by Jen Cole. And, in its inaugural year, the Accelerator launched several key partnerships and on-going programs that advance and demonstrate how artists and designers are working powerfully at the intersection of social change.

 Under the Accelerator, with investment from the National Endowment for the Arts, Herberger Institute established the Practices for Change fellowship. The fellowship is rooted in the belief that creative practices have the ability to radically transform non-arts sectors such as health, transportation, planning, justice and the environment.

The Accelerator welcomed seven Practices for Change fellows from around the country to ASU’s Tempe campus in the summer of 2019. The fellowship supports this cohort of leaders who are using creative practices to advance work in sectors beyond the arts. It also aims to spotlight creative equitable work that is embedded within community development and to better understand how to support artists/designers working in non-traditional ways with new partners to transform practice and public policy for public good. During the year-long program, fellows will work in tandem with ASU faculty and staff as well as mentors with Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP), co-founded by Institute Professor Michael Rohd, to expand their own practical work and document practice and policy learnings from their real-life experiences. The fellows will contribute to case studies, a podcast and a national convening in 2020 where they will connect with others working in the “middle ground” between artistic practice and public policy.

 The Accelerator continued a partnership with the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Southwest Folklife Alliance around building a healthy ecology for artists and designers to work on community change projects in Arizona. The Arizona Creative Communities Institute, or AZCCI, is a state-wide effort in nine communities where artists, public officials, community leaders and business leaders are working together on artist-led community development projects. Projects range from longterm work with Border Arts Corridor in Douglas to a partnership with the City of Tempe organizing podcasts and artist performances on the free public transit service, Orbit. The goal of the project, funded in part by a grant from the Surdna Foundation, is to understand how to advance artist-led change work in urban, suburban and rural communities. To document the project and learnings, Herberger Institute, Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Southwest Folklife Alliance produced a podcast series and artist-essay project documenting the myriad ways artists are leading change in our region. The series officially launches in Fall 2019.

 The Accelerator continues to advance other work, including the Projecting All Voices program, an effort funded by the Mellon Foundation to invest in and advance the careers of artists who have been traditionally under-represented in the Southwest, and the Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable communities, a project supported by the Kresge Foundation to deepen teaching and learning about creative placemaking, to create and document industry standards for how art and design can transform community development, sustainability, public policy and other “adjacent fields” and to document and replicate new ways community leaders can define and measure the social impact of art and design projects. 

2019-20 Practices for Change Fellows

Pamela Bridgeforth

Pamela Bridgeforth


Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pamela Bridgeforth, director of programs for the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, oversees PACDC’s Member Services programs and launched its Community Development Leadership Institute, which serves as a training and technical assistance umbrella for the association’s 130 organizations and other practitioners working to advance equitable neighborhood revitalization. In addition to leading the creation of two placemaking initiatives (The Third Space Initiative and Art-Powered Places) in collaboration with member organizations, artists, arts organizations and community groups, she convenes learning sessions and workshops on placemaking for the sector and produced a placemaking toolkit featured as part of the 2018 edition of PACDC Magazine: Art, Equity + Place: Creating Neighborhood Health, Happiness, and Well-Being with Art. Prior to joining PACDC, she served as executive director of the Walt Whitman Arts Center. She is an advisor and board member of the Camden Repertory Theatre.

Carrie Ann Christensen

Carrie Ann Christensen


St. Paul, Minnesota

Carrie Christensen’s work in design, planning, education and community engagement falls at the intersection of equity and the environment. With a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in urban studies from Stanford University, her cross-sector work combines facilitation, design thinking, community organizing, project management, data analysis, curation, planning and environmental design processes. Christensen is a published author, an adjunct faculty at the University of Minnesota, a 2001 Fulbright Scholar and a 2010 Creative Community Leadership Institute Fellow. She combines facilitation, creative expression and qualitative data methods to bring diverse community voices into planning and design. Christensen is a senior planner at the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, where she works on park policy, design and community engagement.

Melissa Liu

Melissa Liu


Brooklyn, New York

Melissa Liu has worked at the intersections of art, culture and education over the past decade and is currently interested in intersecting these areas to support non-profit services for New York's Chinatown community as program site director with Immigrant Social Services, Inc. Liu has advocated for people of color and immigrants from different class backgrounds and abilities as an administrative worker, organizer and artist through collaborating with groups and networks including Admin, Zines4Equity, Museum Hue and Occupy Wall Street Arts and Labor. Liu's experience comes from having supported programs, projects and workshops with the Getty Foundation, Hammer and Fowler Museums at UCLA, Columbia University (School of the Arts, Center for Oral History and Business School), College Arts Association, Kelly Street Community Garden in the Bronx, The Laundromat Project, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Ruby López Harper

Ruby López Harper


Washington, D.C.

Mexican, mother, wife, dancer, photographer, poet and social justice warrior: Ruby López Harper is the director of Local Arts Services for Americans for the Arts. She is the co-chair for the National Coalition on Arts Preparedness and Emergency Response, serves as chair of the Gard Foundation, serves on the board for the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County and serves on the WETA Community Advisory Council. Harper’s work has focused on grantmaking, supporting individual artists, community development, economic development and tourism and public art. She draws on a varied background that includes corporate affairs, marketing and communications and business administration. She served on the Emerging Leaders Council for Americans for the Arts and was the primary contact for the Arts and Economic Impact Study for Central Ohio. She is a 2017 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Advocacy Leadership Institute Fellow and Class of 2017 American Express Leadership Academy Alum.

Mallory Rukhsana Nezam

Rukhsana Nezam


Oakland, California

Rukhsana Nezam is a public artist and urban strategist integrating community development, socially-engaged art and urban planning. She works with government entities, grassroots cultural organizations and artists to bring arts and equity into community planning, and has helped developed arts programs at Smart Growth America, PolicyLink and Metropolitan Area Planning Council. As an artist and cultural producer, she uses performance and play in public spaces to disarm and connect. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, she is the founder of St. Louis Improv Anywhere, and involved in many artworks and interventions as an artist and activist after the death of Mike Brown, in Ferguson. Nezam’s research focuses on the racial equity impacts of artist residencies in local government. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard University in art, design and the public domain.

Tara Mei Smith

Tara Mei Smith


New York, New York

Tara Mei Smith is passionate about creating and supporting sustainable and equitable frameworks so that people and places can thrive for generations to come. She has over 12 years of experience working on innovative, catalytic projects. Her background includes work as a womenswear designer and supply chain manager (as part of Proenza Schouler’s CFDA award-winning team and as head designer at Waitex), as a sustainability consultant at Field Guide and as a community planner and environmental stewardship director at Extra Terrestrial Projects. She has organized thought leadership convenings such as Moat Oracle’s inaugural summit on the future of digital attention, Attention.io and The Untokening Durham mobility conference. Recently she worked with a coalition of artists and community members to create a place-based equitable engagement blueprint for all future projects in Durham, NC. Her academic training is in materials chemistry and urban studies at Brown University and fashion design at F.I.T. She is an Audubon Toyota Conservation Innovation Fellow and Next City Vanguard.

Nella Young

Nella Young


Boston, Massachusetts

Nella Young is a senior program director at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit in housing and community development. With a background in experiential education and asset-based planning, Young is interested in how creative expression can be harnessed as a force for greater social cohesion, resilience and equity. Young is a champion for the integration of culture and creativity into community development and is responsible for launching two influential grant programs at Enterprise: Collaborative Actions and Climate and Cultural Resilience. She is part of Enterprise’s efforts to take an increasingly holistic, place-based approach to community development that puts residents, and their culture, at the center. Young holds a master’s degree in urban and environmental policy and planning from Tufts University and a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, where she majored in studio arts.

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