Office of Cultural Affairs welcomes new executive director Adriane V. Jefferson

For the first time in the 21^st century, the city of Atlanta has a new executive director of the Office of Cultural Affairs: Adriane V. Jefferson. She succeeds Camille Love, who was appointed OCA director by Mayor Bill Campbell in the 1990s. The typical tenure of a city’s cultural affairs director is eight to 10 years, often coinciding with political administrations, which makes this passing of the baton long overdue. 

Most recently, Jefferson served as director of cultural affairs for the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where she led the city’s cultural equity and anti-racism initiatives. At a sweet spot in her career, Jefferson is imbued with youthful enthusiasm coupled with significant arts administration experience. 

Jefferson’s mother served in the Air Force, so the family moved often before eventually settling in New London, Connecticut. She later attended Florida Memorial University, a historic Black college in Miami, from which she received a bachelor’s in popular music in 2009. At the time, she was interested in music and songwriting, including hip-hop and spoken word, and it was her intention to go into the music business.  

From 2008 to 2010, Jefferson worked for Miami’s Overtown Youth Center, where she helped develop the drama program. This pivotal experience shifted her passion from music to nonprofit arts leadership, which led to her enrollment in the Savannah College of Arts and Design arts administration graduate program.

In 2015, Jefferson returned to Connecticut to serve as the executive director and senior director of programs for Writer’s Block Ink in New London. Prior to her appointment as director of New Haven’s Cultural Affairs Department in February 2020, she also served as an art program manager for Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development. 

Jefferson’s career is distinguished by her commitment to advancing cultural equity — community by community. In 2022, she initiated New Haven’s Cultural Equity Plan. As outlined in the plan, cultural equity is the creation of conditions in which all people can vibrantly express their culture in their communities. Jefferson received national recognition for this work, which, understandably, caught the attention of the city of Atlanta.

Jefferson has spent her first few months in Atlanta listening, as well as experiencing Atlanta’s diverse neighborhoods and culture. She understands that she has much to learn about the breadth and depth of Atlanta’s cultural assets and therefore is familiarizing herself with OCA’s history, structure and initiatives as well as the role the city plays in the ever-expanding cultural ecology of the Atlanta region. She is learning how to effectively work with the mayor and City Council and establishing strong relationships with the Mayor’s Art Advisory Committee, which was launched in 2023 and whose members are representative of the broad cultural community.

Jefferson has also been charged with collaborating with local, national and international partners to position Atlanta as a global cultural powerhouse. She is challenged by the current national political climate that not only has questioned the validity of cultural equity but also government support for the arts. Last, but not least, she has to figure out how to increase resources for the arts — be it public, private or otherwise.

With Jefferson’s appointment the city of Atlanta has the opportunity to take a fresh look at its funding initiatives and cultural programs from soup to nuts, including its grants for services; support for artists; youth programs; public art projects; and program initiatives including the Atlanta Jazz Festival and Elevate. According to Atiba Mbiwan of The Zeist Foundation, who also is a member of the Mayor’s Art Advisory Committee and Arts Capital/Atlanta, Jefferson has indicated that everything is on the table for discussion. 

Bem Joiner, the creative entrepreneur behind Atlanta Influences Everything and a member of the Arts Advisory Committee, served on the search committee that recommended Jefferson to Mayor Andre Dickens. He believes that she is a powerful and effective convener. 

And convening is exactly what is needed now. To that end, Jefferson is bringing her strategic planning experience to the table. Over the next six months, she plans to launch a culture action plan, which she defines as “a shorter plan that gets you through the first one to two years that includes actual strategic steps.” That plan will lay the groundwork for a full-blown strategic plan.

We discussed the legendary leadership of Mayor Maynard Jackson, who established the city of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs in 1974. When he returned to office in 1990, he organized a summit that brought together 500 leaders in Atlanta’s arts community for a robust planning process. The resulting document, the Atlanta Blueprint for the Arts, steered the city’s cultural work for many years. It was successful because Mayor Jackson empowered the arts community and listened to what it had to say, offering an extraordinary example of collaboration between government and community. 

Today, in the 21^st century, Joiner believes that Atlanta’s public infrastructure needs upgrades. “We’re three generational operating systems behind,” he said. 

Despite the promise and hope surrounding Jefferson’s appointment, questions remain. Will the city empower Jefferson to upgrade our cultural infrastructure? Will the city support creative solutions, as well as provide the financial resources necessary for success? Political will is a necessity. 

Laura Hennighausen of Arts Capital | Atlanta is keenly aware of how under-resourced Atlanta arts organizations are, which has been recently compounded by loss of federal funding. She points to Charlotte, North Carolina, as a good model where the private and public sectors were recently able to increase that city’s annual cultural budget to $11 million. In contrast, Atlanta’s budget is only $3.5 million, not including the Jazz Festival. 

Hennighausen underscores the need for Atlanta to undertake a robust strategic cultural process that brings together nonprofit organizations, individuals and the business community with the city of Atlanta. OCA is 50 years old, and it is time to examine its dual roles as a funding agency and as a cultural producer. Atlanta touts itself as the culture capital of the Southeast, but it needs to take steps to ensure a healthy infrastructure to live up to that reputation.

So what exactly are Jefferson’s pathways to success? Mbiwan believes that she needs “to keep moving around and out” and to experience Atlanta’s extraordinary “culture of neighborhoods.” She needs to advocate for strong public and private partnerships and identify the leaders who are in the position who can stabilize and grow the arts. 

For Joiner, Jefferson’s pathways to success should include an audit of OCA’s relationships, both internally and externally, a deep understanding of the region and cross-sector collaboration. She needs to draw upon her skills as a convener in order to establish great relationships with community and private sector leaders.

My advice to Mayor Dickens is to empower Jefferson to do her job. Allow her to freely question and evaluate everything — nothing is too sacred. Let her lead the effort to craft an achievable and visionary strategic plan that is grounded in the realities of our time. 

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Louise E. Shaw was executive director of Nexus Contemporary Art Center, now Atlanta Contemporary, when she served as a committee chair on the Mayor’s Blueprint for the Arts initiative in 1990. She recently served as Curator of the David J. Sencer CDC Museum.