Barack Obama Appoints Tisch Dean as Vice Chair of President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities

By Richard Pierce

The White House announced on Sept. 16 that Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, has been appointed by President Barack Obama as vice chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Tisch Dean’s Council member and theatrical producer Margo Lion will serve as co-chair.
      “My administration is committed to…investing in the future of arts and the humanities, and these individuals will serve my team well as we work to accomplish these goals,” said Obama. “I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead.”
      Campbell has been the Tisch dean since 1991. She began her career in New York as the executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and in 1987, Mayor Edward I. Koch invited her to serve as commissioner of cultural affairs of the City of New York. She is currently working on a book on Romare Bearden for Oxford University Press (2011 expected publication date). She served in the voluntary position of chair of the New York State Council on the Arts from 2007-2009, and serves as the chairman of the board of Tisch Asia, the Tisch School of the Arts Singapore campus.
      Margo Lion is an adjunct professor and a member of the Tisch Dean’s Council. Her career has spanned theatre, politics, and education. In 1977, Lion began producing theater for the not-for-profit company, Music-Theater Group/Lenox Arts Center, and in 1982 began her work as a commercial theatre producer. Her shows on Broadway include: Hairspray; Caroline, or Change; and Angels in America. Lions’s productions have garnered 20 Tony Awards, four Olivier Awards, and one Pulitzer Prize.
      The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities was created under President Reagan and is a non-partisan advisory committee to the President of the United States on cultural matters. The First Lady is the honorary chairman of the committee and its members are both private citizens—artists, scholars, educators, and patrons of the arts and humanities—and the heads of the federal agencies with a cultural role, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Library of Congress, the Departments of Education, the Interior, and State, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.