Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio
October 5, 2021
S9E11: Avery Willis Hoffman
Avery Willis Hoffman is a writer, director, producer and curator. Hoffman recently joined Brown University as the inaugural artistic director of the Brown Arts Institute.
She talked about how the arts can give a divided society a structure for working through difficult topics:
If you’re just at the school board meeting where people are yelling and screaming about this and that and they want to ban this book, that is a heated, intense environment. Now you take that same topic and you put it into an artistic space and people behave differently.
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Avery, you might want to check out Ellen’s and Jessica’s earlier conversation with Rosanne Somerson, president of the Rhode Island School of Design.
This season’s theme music is from Solar Echoes, by Nigel Stanford.
And a big thanks to this season’s sponsor, Mailchimp.
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