Panel: Miami Creative: A Decade of Transformation

Dr. Carol Damian is an Art Historian, past Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University and former Professor of Art History. Dr. Damian has contributed to numerous publications and lectures frequently on Latin American and Caribbean art, and the local art scene. She serves on a number of community boards, including the Art in Public Places Trust for Miami Dade and has curated many notable exhibitions. 

Richard Florida is university professor in the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, a distinguished visiting fellow at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, and the cofounder and editor at large of The Atlantic’s CityLab. In his modern classic The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books) urbanist Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new social class reshaping the twenty-first century’s economy, geography, and workplace. This Creative Class is made up of engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and lawyers, poets and programmer, whose work turns on the creation of new forms. Increasingly, Florida observes, this Creative Class determines how workplaces are organized, which companies prosper or go bankrupt, and which cities thrive, stagnate or decline. Now updated with a new preface that considers the latest developments in our changing cities, The Rise of the Creative Class is the definitive edition of this foundational book on our contemporary economy. The New York Times called noted that “An important book for those who feel passionately about the future of the urban center. [Florida] changed the framework for discussing social and economic inequality.” 

Alberto Ibargüen is president of Knight Foundation, which promotes informed and engaged communities through grants to support journalism, community engagement, arts and culture, and related research. He is a former publisher of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald; a former board chair of PBS, the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and the World Wide Web Foundation; and has served on the boards of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Wesleyan University, the Council on Foreign Relations, PepsiCo, American Airlines, and AOL. Ibargüen is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and graduated from Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Jordan Levin is an arts writer who has chronicled culture and community in Miami since the early 90’s, including 18 years as a staff critic at the Miami Herald. She has written for the New York Times, American Theatre Magazine, the L.A. Times, Dance Magazine, and numerous other South Florida and national publications. A former performer on New York’s downtown art/nightlife scenes, she also does community engagement and storytelling for arts organizations, and is a writer-in-residence with the Miami Light Project.

Barry Fellman has served as curator of photography at institutions in Miami and New York and is currently director of Miami’s Center for Visual Communication. His photographs have been exhibited at museums and public venues in South Florida and nationally. He is a Silver Knight awardee and is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Barry Fellman’s new photo book and exhibit, titled Miami Creative: A Decade of Transformation, explores what has turned Miami into a global artistic center — with Wynwood as its Ground Zero. More than two hundred photos, taken over the course of the last ten years, chronicle Miami’s artistic life, from major museums to popular grassroots events. It includes both, major institutions such as The New World Symphony, Frost Science Museum, Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Bass Museum, and Perez Art Museum Miami, and the close-knit community of cutting edge galleries and studios; it captures iconic ballet performances but also immersive theater, sound art and electronic music. Most notably, Fellman’s immediate style makes you part of the experience, breaking the barriers between observer and participant. His unorthodox angles pull you in and provoke you to consider the familiar anew. Miami Creative will be also the subject of an upcoming exhibition at Miami Center for Architecture and Design.