Lisa Donovan is a professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) in North Adams, Massachusetts. Previously she was an associate professor of Education and the director of the Creative Arts in Learning Division at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lisa has broad experience working as an arts educator and administrator in a variety of organizations including Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival; Berkshire Opera Company; Barrington Stage Company; University of Massachusetts’ Department of Theater; and Boston University’s Theater, Visual Arts, and Tanglewood Institutes. She is spearheading several projects that foreground the use of the arts as a strategy for regional change—as Director of the Creative Compact for Collective Impact project to create a blueprint for arts education for Berkshire County, Codirector of the Berkshire Regional Arts Integration Network funded by the National Department of Education and Innovation, and Director of the MCLA Institute for Arts and Humanities funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has published widely on arts integration and rural arts education.
Lisa served as executive director of the Massachusetts Alliance for Arts Education and is the coeditor and author of a five-book series on arts integration published by Shell Education, Strategies to Integrate the Arts Series. She recently conducted research on leveraging change for arts education in rural areas. Lisa was voted Best Professor in 2017 as part of the Berkshire Eagle’s Best of the Berkshires competition and was a finalist in the 2018 Berkshire Trendsetters Award for Creative Economy Standout.
She has a BA in psychology from the State University of New York–Oneonta, an MA in communications from Boston University, and a PhD from Lesley University.
