Executive Director, Prior Performing Arts Center

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Prior Performing Arts Center

 

College of the Holy Cross

Worcester, Massachusetts

 

The College of the Holy Cross ("Holy Cross"), the highly selective Catholic, Jesuit, liberal arts undergraduate institution, seeks an inspired and engaging leader to serve as the first Executive Director of the Prior Performing Arts Center (The PAC). Reporting directly to the Provost, the Executive Director will provide overall administrative leadership of the PAC and will work with a dynamic, creative team of faculty and staff to establish the PAC’s strategic direction and to develop new and continuing opportunities for students, faculty, staff, and community members to engage with and experience the arts at Holy Cross. The College has a longstanding tradition of exceptional arts programming, and the new Prior Performing Arts Center is expected to build on that tradition while providing leadership and resources to elevate and amplify the arts at Holy Cross. The Executive Director will be expected to work with faculty, staff, students, and the College’s senior leadership team to position the PAC as a place of energy, dynamism, and creativity for all members of the campus community and the city of Worcester, enriching the campus environment and enhancing its teaching, research, and engagement missions.

 

Holy Cross is one of 27 Jesuit institutions of higher education in the United States, and the only exclusively undergraduate liberal arts college. Founded in 1843 on a hill overlooking the city of Worcester (about 40 miles west of Boston), the Holy Cross community encompasses the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of 3,000 undergraduate students, over 300 full- and part-time faculty, 800 staff, and nearly 40,000 alumni. The inaugural Executive Director of the PAC will be joining Holy Cross at an exciting moment. The College recently appointed a new President, Vincent D. Rougeau, who has energized the community, leading it through a series of critically important conversations from which it has emerged with a renewed sense of purpose and a vision for excellence.

 

Scheduled to open its doors in Fall 2022, the 84,000 square foot Prior Performing Arts Center will serve as an incubator for multidisciplinary learning and support creative collaboration among students from all academic disciplines at Holy Cross. Destined to be a campus focal point in the years to come, the ambitious and comprehensive performing arts center will include dedicated spaces for the fine and performing arts as well as spaces and technology to support creative interactions between the arts and other disciplines. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the PAC will include: a 400-seat concert hall, a 200-seat flexible performance space, the relocated Cantor Art Gallery, a flexible space with a cafe that will support creative collaboration among students from all academic disciplines offering a shared multimedia teaching space, and several outdoor amenities.

 

The successful candidate will be an inclusive, engaging arts leader, able to cultivate relationships with faculty, staff, students, colleagues, donors, and community members, as well as with local, regional, national and international arts communities. The successful candidate will be passionate about the College’s Jesuit, liberal arts mission and insightful and farsighted about the role of the arts in pursuit of that mission. Furthermore, they will demonstrate a proven commitment to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion and to the role of the arts in promoting these values. They will bring a record of innovative and strategic leadership and will demonstrate a deeply collaborative leadership style, entrepreneurial drive, and the ability to skillfully balance multiple needs and interests. Fundraising experience and thoughtful staff leadership are essential, as well as exemplary communication skills.

 

Holy Cross has formed a search committee and retained Isaacson, Miller, a national executive search firm, to assist in conducting this important search. Expressions of interest from candidates of all backgrounds are welcome, regardless of religious and/or spiritual beliefs. Confidential inquiries, nominations, and applications can be submitted electronically to:

 

Ben Tobin, Partner

Micah Pierce, Managing Associate

Isaacson, Miller

www.imsearch.com/8240

 

The College of the Holy Cross is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer and complies with all Federal and Massachusetts laws concerning Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action in the workplace. For more information, please visit www.holycross.edu/diversity.

 

Holy Cross aspires to meet the needs of dual-career couples, in part through its membership in Higher Education Consortium of Central Massachusetts (http://www.heccma.org) and the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (https://new-england.hercjobs.org/) .