UB Arts Management Program, Why Manage the Arts Speaker Series, Fall 2019

Kaitlyn Chandler, one of the organizers of the recently established union at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and Nicole S. Cohen, associate professor and author of Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in the Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) will discuss labor organizing and unionizing of cultural workers and freelance writers in the arts and in the media sector. Labor issues and unionizing have become a hot topic in arts organizations. Recent events at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, MoMA PS1, and the Guggenheim point to the increasing acrimony over pay scales and working conditions at prominent arts organizations. Chandler and Cohen will discuss this phenomenon and the impact it will have on future arts institution models in moderated discussion led by Katja Praznik (Assistant Professor, Arts Management Program).

Kaitlyn Chandler is a video editor and motion designer from Nashville, Tennessee. During and after her undergraduate at Memphis College of Art, she worked in various internships, overnight jobs, and on short film and music video sets as a PA before moving the Brooklyn, where she currently lives. She works at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where she was one of the organizers of the BAM union and currently serves on the union’s bargaining committee.

Nicole S. Cohen is an associate professor at the University of Toronto (Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology and the Faculty of Information). Her book Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) received the 2017 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association. She researches in the area of political economy of communication, specifically work and labor in the media and cultural industries, media and cultural worker organizing, and journalism (new research focuses on gender, race, and work in digital journalism). Nicole collaborates on the SSHRC-funded project Cultural Workers Organize, and, with Greig de Peuter and Enda Brophy, is writing a book on cultural workers’ collective responses to precarity for Pluto Press. Nicole and Greig are also researching digital journalists’ union organizing activity.