Jane Marsland

Jane Marsland has been an articulate advocate for the arts for many years and has served on a wide range of boards, advisory groups and committees. Jane was a co-founder of For Dance and Opera, co-founder and Director of Technical Assistance of The Creative Trust: Working Capital for the Arts, as well as co-founder and director of ARTS 4 CHANGE. She has been the recipient of two arts community awards: a “Harold” in 2001 and the Sandra Tulloch Award for Innovation in the Arts in 2002. Jane has managed arts organizations since 1970, and was General Manager of the Danny Grossman Dance Company from 1982 to 1999. In 1995, she received the first M. Joan Chalmers Award for Arts Administration for outstanding leadership in the arts. In 2011 she was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Rita Davies and Margo Bindhardt Cultural Leadership Award.

Since October 1999, Jane has been working as a freelance arts consultant and has worked with more than 90 arts organizations.

Her work with the small to mid sized arts organizations has involved the design, structure, and interaction of the organizational format, equation and the planning and organizational learning processes. She believes that it is important to develop new approaches and methods of working to emphasize agile and adaptive organizational responses that are informed by knowledge of constant environmental changes.

She utilizes a process of working with arts organizations that she has learned through eighteen years of being affiliated with Arts Action Research in New York and with whom she is now a Principal Associate. She believes that each organization has a unique vision, point of view and way of working. The challenge is to learn how to discover, understand and reveal these unique qualities and processes. To do this requires the building of a relationship with the organization and acknowledging what has been accomplished by the organization to date. So she always begin with what is right, what effective elements are already in place, the vision and values, existing or evolving artistic programming, internal and external working relationships, and ways the organization collaborates and problem solves. To do this, her interventions are designed in the form of a process within which the group can achieve better understanding, articulation and communication of the artistic/programmatic centre of the organization. The sessions are to help each group achieve real clarity and understanding of their mission/vision, where they want their organization to be, and the action plans on how to get there. She never tries to reshape an organization to fit a design or conform to a model.