The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) announced today that Betty G. Farrell will become Director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago (CPC). The CPC is a joint initiative of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and NORC. The CPC, located on the University of Chicago campus, is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary research center dedicated to informing policies that affect the arts, humanities, and cultural heritage. Farrell will begin work at the CPC in July.
Betty Farrell's previous experience working with the Cultural Policy Center demonstrates her ability to delve deeply into a subject and transform raw data into information useful and valuable to students, practitioners, policy makers, and researchers," said CPC Co-Director and NORC Senior Fellow Norman Bradburn. She has deep ties to the cultural community and she understands the leadership needed to effectively understand and communicate the issues facing cultural institutions today."
Farrell is well known for her work in cultural participation building and inclusivity. Her current research project, Cultural Pluralism in the Chicago Art World, began with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and investigates questions of access, diversity, and inclusivity across a range of Chicago cultural institutions.
Farrell also is the author of several books, including her most recent work, Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts, edited with Diane Grams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). The book is based on interviews conducted by researchers at the Cultural Policy Center, who spoke with leaders, staff, volunteers, and audience members from 85 nonprofit cultural organizations about their efforts to increase participation and the extent to which those efforts succeeded. She is currently Associate Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences, and a senior lecturer in the Graduate Social Science Division at the University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University.
Farrell succeeds Lawrence Rothfield, former Faculty Director, and Carroll Joynes, former Executive Director who together spent a decade building the program, and current Co-Directors Norman Bradburn and Carroll Joynes, who led the Center during the search for a new Director.
To learn more about the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, visit:http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu
—Prof. Chuan He
