The Department of Arts Administration, Education & Policy at The Ohio State University is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Jennifer Novak-Leonard as the Lawrence and Isabel Barnett Distinguished Visiting Professor in Arts Policy and Administration from August 15, 2024, through August 14, 2025. Novak-Leonard’s current appointment is Research Associate Professor and Research Director of the Arts Impact Initiative in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on the social roles of arts, artists, and creativity, how they impact people and communities, and implications for policy and practice. She specializes in the development and use of novel measurement systems to understand cultural participation and the personal and public values derived from these experiences to inform multiple domains of public and social policy. Her research examines racial, ethnic, and socio-economic inequities in outcomes and opportunities for arts, artists, and movements toward cultural democracy. 

Dr. Novak-Leonard has also led numerous applied research efforts, including those funded by the National Endowment for the Arts; The James Irvine Foundation; the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; and Creatives Rebuild New York, among others. Her scholarly publications span research on the public perceptions of artists; public funding; arts as a means of immigrant integration; and measuring the intrinsic impacts of arts experiences. From 2016-2020, Novak-Leonard was the Principal Investigator of one of the four inaugural National Endowment for the Arts’ Research Labs. She serves as the Board President of Social Theory, Politics and the Arts and served as the Board Vice President and Research Director for the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) through 2023. Novak-Leonard also serves on the editorial advisory boards of Cultural Trends, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, and The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society.

We are honored to have Dr. Novak-Leonard join our faculty next academic year. We anticipate her contributions in teaching and research being meaningful and impactful. Please extend her your warm welcome!