NEA announces new Director of Research and Analysis

IFACCA/Artshub, 26 July 2005,USA

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced that Harvard University professor Karen Painter will assume the role of Director of Research and Analysis in September 2005. Painter will be responsible for identifying program-related issues of interest to the NEA and for developing research and analysis to address those issues. Karen Painter, 40, is currently Associate Professor at Harvard's Department of Music where she teaches undergraduate courses in the history of Western music and seminars in aesthetics and 19th century composers, among other topics. National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia said, "Karen Painter is a brilliant musicologist with a wealth of experiences in the national and international music world. Passionate about music and its power to connect individuals, she understands how to put research into action. She brings a wealth of learning and experience to the Arts Endowment." As well as research focusing on the history of music listening, Painter has also been active developing conferences and symposia for musical institutions, including "Beethoven and Wagner" (February 2006) and "New Perspectives on Wagner's Flying Dutchman" (March 2005). She has also worked with the Ojai Music Festival in California and the Mozarteum conservatory in Salzburg, Austria. Painter has worked as editor-in-chief of the journal Current Musicology from 1995-96, editor of Mahler and His World (Princeton University Press, 2002), co-editor of Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (Getty Research Institute, due spring 2006), and was program notes author for Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. An upcoming book examines Mozart's music and its role in music education from the Enlightenment through to the more recent Mozart Effect. Painter received her undergraduate degree in music and philosophy from Yale University in 1987 and doctorate in music from Columbia University in 1996. From 1995-97, she was an assistant professor of music at Dartmouth College before joining Harvard in 1997. She has also received a number of prestigious awards, including an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung research fellowship awarded by the German government and, in spring 2000, she received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin Karen Painter lives with her husband Richard and their two children, Elizabeth and William in Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. For further information, CLICK HERE

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