Arts Council Executive Director Departing For D.C.

Brian Slattery Photo

Fitzmaurice.

Arts Council of Greater New Haven Executive Director Daniel Fitzmaurice is leaving his post to take a position as chief of staff at Americans for the Arts in Washington, DC

Fitzmaurice’s departure caps a highly successful five-year run,” the Arts Council wrote in a release made public Tuesday morning. Since 2017, Fitzmaurice has played a pivotal leadership role in the efforts to grow and expand the Arts Council to advance the vibrant and diverse creative ecosystem in the greater New Haven region and across the state. A respected and influential advocate for the arts, Fitzmaurice leaves the organization poised for continued expansion and impact in the arts communities that it serves.”

Fitzmaurice’s overall principle as executive director of the Arts Council was that access to the arts is a fundamental human right. Hence, under Fitzmaurice’s tenure, the Arts Council began providing individual membership for free. (Membership now stands at over 3,000 people.) The Arts Council also supported 41 projects, totaling $1,617,539 in donations and grants. At the state level, Fitzmaurice advocated for the arts through the Create the Vote campaign and monthly advocacy alerts, and served on Gov. Lamont’s transition advisory committee for arts, culture, and tourism. He oversaw the development of The Arts Paper into a daily online journalism site, as well as the creation of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative for public high school students.

Perhaps most crucially, Fitzmaurice’s work in strengthening connections between the Arts Council and the community around it made the organization the right host, partnering with the City of New Haven, for the Creative Sector Relief Fund, supporting individual artists during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also worked with the city on the New Haven Cultural Fund and with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven on Racial Equity and Community Healing through the Arts grants. Together these efforts represented the disbursement of about $1 million to 474 individual artists, arts workers, and cultural organizations. Collaborating with the city also led to New Haven rolling out the state’s first cultural equity plan in January. The Arts Council’s close work with the city and other community partners was instrumental in the council receiving a $500,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

According to Fitzmaurice, Americans for the Arts contacted him as part of a search for candidates for chief of staff, a new position the organization is creating. Fitzmaurice isn’t the only new hire there; the organization also just hired a new director of people and culture and a new CEO, in response to what Fitzmaurice called a big public calling out and calling in from members” for what NPR called its lack of diversity and commitment to help arts groups led by and for people of color.”

Their reaching out was essential, because I wasn’t looking and wouldn’t have noticed that it was posted,” Fitzmaurice said. Creating the chief-of-staff position marks a very intentional shift for the organization to be a little less hierarchical, a little more connected,” he said. It’s trying to bring the organization more together.”

Fitzmaurice described himself as very myself” during the hiring process. I shared lots of experiences about what has been happening here,” he said, regarding the Arts Council’s work in giving more support to Black and Brown artists and Black and Brown-led arts organizations. What has been happening here has really been resonating with them … and what they are striving for and hoping to create inside the organization.”

I’m only excited about this because we are aligned as far as our values go,” Fitzmaurice said.

Leaving his post at the Arts Council and heading to D.C has given Fitzmaurice a chance to reflect on his tenure as executive director and what he has learned that he can bring to the new position. One thing he learned was that reaching out to everyone in New Haven’s diverse arts community meant not just creating a more diverse board and having meetings with community leaders, building trust and relationships,” Fitzmaurice said; it also meant reaching out to all art forms. 

Knowing that we needed to celebrate all forms of creativity opened up a pathway to musicians and dancers,” he said. That also included film. We couldn’t be happier to have been supportive of Black Haven earlier.” The Arts Council also did discreet things to see that public art is moving forward.”

Fitzmaurice also learned to be more focused on what the communities needed instead of what was going to generate us money. Now we’re seeing the rewards of that,” he said. One of those rewards lay in working more closely with the city — specifically arts czar Adriane Jefferson — and not to be in a competitive relationship.” That partnership, according to Fitzmaurice, was what made the Arts Council stand out to the NEA, which declared the amity between the council and the city very unusual.”

Fitzmaurice is sanguine that his departure and the transition to a new executive director will be smooth. The Arts Council already created a succession plan two years ago, as Fitzmaurice recalled saying that we should really talk about what happens if we get Covid.” It was also a chance to move the Arts Council to relying more on its strengths as an organization than on any individual staff member. Historically, he said, the Arts Council has been an organization that is more driven by the personalities of its directors than by its values,” he said. Defining its values more clearly would mean that a new leader doesn’t have to come in and reinvent everything, but can join because of what’s going on.”

One of the key players for Fitzmaurice in keeping things running at the Arts Council is current Operations Director Winter Marshall, who will act as interim executive director during the organization’s job search. As Arts Council communications manager Sarah Ficca pointed out, We’re pretty lucky because she’s been here for 20 years. She has that much institutional knowledge,” she said. How many organizations have somebody with that much experience that they can count on?”

What overall lessons from New Haven will Fitzmaurice bring to Washington?

Just utilizing the power of an institution to support people, and not institutions,” Fitzmaurice said. Right now we’re really focused on artists and arts workers. They are the foundation of institutions that have been built up over 50 years.” His work has involved and will continue to involve thinking holistically about what those people need. Yes, they need funding, but they also need childcare and housing and social justice. That’s important to me and critical to the future we’re in. You have to listen to those people and trust those people.”

Fitzmaurice is also gratified in looking back on his five-year run as executive director. The Arts Council is at the point where we’re effective about the change we’re trying to do,” he said. I stand on two feet about that, and I didn’t five years ago.”

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