A partner of the Aspen Institute's Global Initiative for Art, Culture, and Society. Year-round interdisciplinary debates, research, colloquia, and lecture series on such topics as the Sciences, Technology, and the Arts or The Economics of Culture/The Culture of Economics. A seat of research on cultural policy and topics of international concern such as culture and development or culture and globalization. Development of Master programs in Cultural Translation and in Cultural Entrepreneurship, Policy, and Arts Management.

Aspen Cultural Diplomacy Forum

Culture in Conflict/Culture on the Move

November 13-15, 2008

Cercle de l’Union Interalliée Paris, France

www.aspeninstitute.org/cdf

About the Forum

• Cultural diplomacy is the development and use of media, arts, and cultural assets in international political, social, economic, and scholarly exchanges. Formerly perceived and practiced as the monopoly of governments, the ideas and usages of cultural diplomacy are evolving very rapidly to include both public and private undertakings that engage difference across societies, strengthen international relations, and sustain peace-building efforts.

• The Aspen Cultural Diplomacy Forum is an independent, multidisciplinary, and action-oriented worldwide convening of the Aspen Institute Global Initiative on Arts, Culture, and Society. It builds upon ongoing Aspen Institute public diplomacy roundtables and serves as an annual high-level and neutral platform to discuss and act on possible solutions to critical issues in the field, while further reflecting on the development of diverse media, arts, and cultural resources for the strengthening of international relations, mutual understanding, security, and peace-building efforts.

• The inaugural Forum is organized in partnership with the Arts Arena Forum on Culture & Society at The American University of Paris and Institut Aspen France.

The Forum aims to foster international cultural cooperation policies and to seed new practices in the field of cultural diplomacy.

Government officials, corporate and civic leaders, diplomats, arts and culture executives, media and public policy professionals, philanthropists, scholars, and artists will engage each other in policy debates and provide actionable information about players, circuits, networks, models of exchange and cooperative engagements, culture and conflict resolution experiments, media and cultural markets, capacity-building initiatives, and cultural diplomacy funding.

Speakers

Confirmed speakers to date are leaders in public policy, new media and technologies, and the visual and performing arts, including:

o Madeleine Albright, Former U.S. Secretary of State
o Martin Davidson, Director General, British Council
o Amir Dossal, Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Partnerships
o Allan Gerson, President, AG International Law, PLLC
o Vicki Goldberg, photography critic, author of The Power of Photography
o Peter Goldmark, head Environmental Defense, former chairman and CEO of the International Herald Tribune, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation
o Sydney Harman, Member of Council on Foreign Relations
o Jan Hladík, Program Specialist, Division of Cultural Objects and Intangible Heritage/ Section of Museums and Cultural Objects, UNESCO
o Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate in chemistry, Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Cornell University, poet and playwright
o Ellen Hume, Research Director of the Center for Future Civic Media, M.I.T.
o Walter Isaacson, President, The Aspen Institute
o Yudhishthir Raj Isar, President, Culture Action Europe and Jean Monnet Professor at The American University of Paris
o Sean Kelly, curator, founder Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
o Lisa Koenigsberg, President and founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture
o James Landon, senior partner Jones Day, General Counsel Woodruff Center for the Arts
o Aaron Levy, Executive Director and Senior Curator, Slought Foundation; curator of the US Pavilion, 2008 Venice Biennale-Architecture
o Robert Lynch, President and CEO, Americans for the Arts
o Bruno Maquart, Director General, France-Muséums (including the Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Orsay, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Musée du Quai-Branly, Réunion des Musées Nationaux), and Director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project
o Olara Otunnu, Former UN Under-Secretary General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict
o Fred Ritchin, Professor of Photography and New Media, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, director of PixelPress, former picture editor The New York Times Magazine
o Philip Scher, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Oregon, current recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship for research on cultural heritage (Caribbean)
o Ambassador John Shattuck, CEO, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
o Ellen Sorrin, Director, the George Balanchine Trust, Managing Director of the New York Choreographic Institute (New York City Ballet)
o Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Director of the 2007 Venice Biennale

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