About Joanne Scheff Bernstein

Joanne Scheff Bernstein is an educator, consultant, speaker and author in the field of arts and culture management and marketing.

As a marketing and strategic planning consultant, Ms. Scheff Bernstein has worked with diverse non-profit arts organizations including theaters, dance companies, operas, symphonies, chamber music groups, presenting organizations, and museums. She has served as interim executive director of Luna Negra Dance Theater and executive director of Lake Forest Symphony. Consulting clients include, among others, Northwest Indiana Symphony Orhestra, Illinois Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Opera Theater, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Ballet, the American Conservatory Theater, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Ballet Memphis, and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. She was a member of the Dance/USA task force for building audiences for the twenty-first century.

Ms. Scheff Bernstein has extensive experience as a speaker, seminar leader and workshop facilitator across the United States and internationally. International engagements include the annual conference of the Arts Marketing Association of Great Britain, international seminars on cultural economics and corporate sponsorship of the arts in Buenos Aires and Caracas, and international arts management conferences at the Helsinki School of Economics, Bocconi University in Milan, and Queensland University in Brisbane, Australia. In the fall of 2000, she spoke and consulted in several cities in Australia under the auspices of the Australian Arts Council.

She has led seminars for many national, regional, and local arts service organizations such as the Houston Arts Alliance, the Illinois Council of Orchestras, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the Broward County Cultural Arts Commission, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts, the Durham Arts Council, the Upstate New York Presenters’ Association, the Michigan Association of Community Arts Organizations, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the National Society of Fundraising Executives, and many others. She also taught arts marketing principles, strategies, and tactics to 120 musical theater managers and marketing directors for two and one-half days in San Francisco under the auspices of the National Alliance of Musical Theatre.

Joanne Scheff Bernstein authored Arts Marketing Insights: The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley in 2007. She also co-authored a comprehensive text with Professor Philip Kotler entitled Standing Room Only: Strategies for Marketing the Performing Arts, published in January, 1997 by the Harvard Business School Press. She has published articles on arts marketing, strategic planning, and strategic collaborations in the Harvard Business Review, the California Management Review, the International Journal of Arts Management, Economia della Cultura, and other publications.

As an adjunct professor of Arts Management in the Business Institutions program at Northwestern University, she is responsible for teaching arts management, supervising independent field studies and facilitating arts management activities for students such as mentor programs, internships, volunteerism, and job search. She taught Arts Management at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management for eight years, was a visiting professor at Bocconi University in Milan, and a visiting professor at the Helsinki School of Economics.

She is a member of the scientific committee of the International Association for the Management of Arts and Culture (AIMAC) and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Arts Management.

Joanne Scheff Bernstein is a graduate with distinction from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and is a member of the Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society in business.