Closing general session - Nashville Annual Conference: General Sessions

Information Outlook, Feb, 2004 by Bill Ivey

Sponsored by Factiva

WEDNESDAY June 9th, 9:00am

Bill Ivey is the Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt University and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt. Ivey is currently working with Vanderbilt University to develop a center for the study and development of policy relating to the support, creation, and distribution of the arts by government and private enterprise. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Arts & Culture, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Deeply committed to the preservation of culture, Ivey today chairs the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a program of the Library of Congress. He is currently at work on a book about America's endangered 20th-century cultural heritage.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

From May 1998 through September 2001, Ivey served as the seventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federal cultural agency. Ivey is credited with restoring congressional confidence in the work of the NEA. Launched early in 1999, Ivey's Challenge America Initiative has to date garnered more than $25 million in additional congressional appropriations for the Endowment. Prior to government service, Ivey was director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee. He was twice elected board chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Ivey completed degrees in history, folklore, and ethnomusicology, and is the author of numerous articles on country, folk, and popular music. He is a four-time Grammy Award nominee (Best Album Notes category), and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, Wayne State University, and Indiana University.

Ivey was recently named program facilitator for the local music industry's executive education program, Leadership Music.

He also recently inked a deal to write a book explaining how copyright law and corporate practice have separated Americans from their cultural heritage.

Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts