About Joan Lancourt

Joan Lancourt, PhD., had a forty-year management career combining work in the public, private, academic and not-for-profit sectors. Since then, Dr. Lancourt has devoted much of her energy and skills to working with and writing about the efforts of local and regional theater board leaders to increase the diversity of their audiences, boards, and staff. Combining expertise from her work in sustainable community involvement and organizational change, she authored a three-part series for the HowlRound Theatre Commons, an online hub for global theater conversations that encourages world-wide sharing of intellectual and artistic resources and expertise. Her series "Why Boards Don't Need To Be Bored" is based on the experience of innovative theater boards across the country and focuses on the need for more generative board leadership, more strategic decision-making, and for deeper and more meaningful engagement of theater organizations in the diverse racial and ethnic communities they serve. Drawing on her experience as board chair of two theater companies as well as her experience as a community organizer, a manager in and consultant to national and international organizations, and as an executive coach for ten years in a Harvard Kennedy School executive leadership development program, Dr. Lancourt organized a series of multi-theater workshops for local board members. These workshops advocated for a significant increase in racial and age diversity in the audience as well as at all levels of a theater's organization.

Dr. Lancourt received her MSW in community organizing from the UCLA School of Social Work and earned her PhD from The Heller School of Social Policy and Planning at Brandeis University. Always mission driven, she came to see research as an important way to tease out "lessons learned" from past experience, thereby enabling today's practitioners to use them to make current practice more successful. In her 1979 book, Confront or Concede: The Alinsky Citizen Action Organizations, she secured funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to examine and assess the effectiveness of the community organizing model created by the flamboyant community organizer Saul Alinsky. In 1996, with Ed Nevis of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and Helen Vassallo, she co-authored the book Intentional Revolutions: A Seven Point Strategy for Transforming Organizations which identifies critical success factors for making major, sustainable organizational change.

More Than Entertainment: Democracy and the Performing Arts is, in many ways, a synthesis of all she has learned along the way. Her story of Junior Programs, Inc. documents and strengthens our understanding of how the performing arts can be an important catalyst for transformational social change, as well as an effective and compelling way to normalize diversity––be it racial or otherwise. In a sense, the inclusion of a broad range of different perspectives and experiences is an essential ingredient of innovation and, therefore, a prerequisite for the creation of a more just and equitable world. As with her previous books, her extensive research documenting the life and times of Junior Programs, Inc. identifies numerous lessons from the past that are still relevant for today's theater leaders. And what better way to put those lessons into practice than for TYA theaters to form strong and stable partnerships with the communities and schools responsible for ensuring that the next generation of children internalize the democratic values and beliefs needed to guide and inform their life's journey.

Active in her local community on a range of social justice issues, and for several years chair of her town's Commission on Diversity, Inclusion and Community Relations, Dr. Lancourt’s expertise, reflected in numerous articles and papers, ranges from broadly inclusive generative thinking and leadership development to strategic planning, the design and management of structural and cultural change, and the implementation of a wide range of new programs and policies.