Fluency w/ Dr. Durell Cooper
Fluency w/ Dr. Durell Cooper
Season IV, Ep. 4 feat. Dr. Lee Bynum
In February 2023, Bynum assumed the role of Chief Education Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, providing strategic leadership, creative vision, and administrative direction for the organization’s educative initiatives, and serving as an advocate for the value and importance of arts education. Prior to Lincoln Center, Bynum inaugurated the role of Vice President for
Impact at Minnesota Opera, guiding the company’s educational, engagement, and equity work. During Bynum’s tenure, the company made diversification a priority, and the percentage of the staff who identified as people of color rose by fifteen percent, including at the director, vice president, and board levels; built its access apparatus to begin addressing internal policy and artistic programming gaps relative to physical ability and neurodivergence, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, and gender identity; produced multiple mainstage works by Black, Asian, Latinx, and women composers and librettists; and unveiled a community commissioning program that advanced conversations around who-creates-opera-and-for-whom. Additionally, Bynum launched the Creative Development Program, which gave Minnesota Opera a fully articulated set of educational programs—from babies to seniors—rooted in the values of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access and social emotional learning pedagogy. The programs directly address pipeline issues among underrepresented singers, composers, and technical artists, as well as prioritize de-gendering vocal pedagogy and broadening the canon to normalize the programming of underrepresented composers.
Before Minnesota Opera, Bynum was on the program staff of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a decade, working in the Higher Learning, Diversity, and Scholarly Communications and Information Technology funding areas. At the Foundation, Bynum made diversity, equity, and inclusion grants to colleges, universities, community music schools, and museums; supported the creation of K-12 music education programs and arts majors at HBCUs; and funded two PBS documentaries, Tell Them We Are Rising and Driving While Black. As Associate Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Bynum steered a program that shepherded several hundred budding scholars of color through the PhD process at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States and South Africa. Before joining the Foundation, Bynum was the Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, managing the Latinx, Asian American, Native American and comparative ethnic studies programs. Bynum also was invited to be a visiting scholar at the Caritas Institute of Higher Education at Hong Kong’s St. Francis University.
Bynum was part of the 2019 cohort of the Council on Foundation’s Career Pathways Executive Leadership Development Program, as well as a professional mentor for Opera America’s Opera Leaders of Color program for two years. Additional field service includes peer reviewing for the Educating Harlem program; writing for the Harlem Heritage Project; researching as the staff historian for We Are 2042; coordinating the Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity Working Group; making regular contributions on film and television to The Amsterdam News; and serving on the editorial board of Journal of South Asian Studies. As a dramaturg, Bynum has collaborated on the development of new works with American Opera Projects, the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, the John Duffy Institute for New Opera, and Columbia University. And as a librettist, Bynum recently was
Lee Bynum Interview
[EXCERPT]
Dr. Dr. Lee Bynum:
I really wanna push back against the ways that various canons are colonized or the ways that a lot of pedagogy and theater, dance and vocal music is really gendered in a moment where we're asking questions about the very nature of gender right, and really being able to say that any sort of artistic practice that doesn't take into consideration that there are people with disabilities and people who are neurodiverse are practices that are not ones for the future.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Hello listeners, we are back for another episode of Fluency and today I am joined by none other than Dr. Lee Bynum. Dr. Bynum, how are you? Welc ome to Fluency, my friend.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate your having me. Very excited to get a chance to chat with you this afternoon.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
I know, I'm really excited about this conversation too. We've had like one conversation, one-to-one, that actually wasn't that long ago. That was maybe about a year ago.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
It was somewhat formal and very, you know, targeted in what it was that we were talking about. So this is a little bit more free form and I'm really excited to jump in there into the mind of Dr. Bynum and get to know you a little bit better. Maybe we'll start with your origin story. So for those who don't know you as well as I do, tell us a little bit about your origin story.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
I guess the general theme is that I've been working at the nexus of IDEA work and the performing arts for most of the last 20 years. I got started as a performer, like so many do. I started in theater and orchestral music and doing a bit of opera as well, and a little bit of dance. So I had the opportunity to train across disciplines and spend a lot of time performing around the world in a lot of different kinds of works. And after that experience, I started a nonprofit theater company in New York and did that for about 10 years before going back to school. And while in school I really started focusing on doing some of the research that located people of color and queer people, but especially black people who are also queer, back into the historical record, relative to the arts. And pivoted from there to consulting before landing for some period of time at the Mellon Foundation and then at Minnesota Opera and now at Lincoln Center. So I've been a lot of places doing a lot of work that ostensibly is very different, but I think that IDEA piece is so relevant to everything and those values need to inform pretty much everything that's happening at performing arts organizations. So for me, there's been a clear throughline for the work.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. Where were you born? Where were you born originally?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
I was born in Virginia. I grew up in a suburb of Richmond called Henrico County, which isn't super noteworthy for much of anything except Pocahontas is from there. And you know, maybe not a ton has happened in those intervening 400 years, but I moved to New York for college and spent much of the last 25 years in New York. I did a couple of stints in Hong Kong, which is one of my absolute favorite places in the world but I absolutely identify as a New Yorker.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
So you've mentioned the term or the acronym "idea" a couple of times. Or IDEA. So inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility. We call it so many different things in this field.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
We do.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Some of us might call it DEIA. Some of us might call it JEDI, for like justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. How did you come to IDEA as part of your core beliefs and putting it in that framework starting with, say, inclusion first.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like in the performing arts, the inclusion piece is the piece that people have the hardest time wrestling with, right? I mean, obviously, you cannot have inclusion without diversity and you cannot have inclusion without equity. And I feel like there's been some very good momentum towards access and inclusion is just a, a bit more challenging. And I think some of why it's more challenging is that anti-blackness really hasn't gone anywhere. And anti-blackness is a thing that exists even when there are very strong feelings about being more accessible or being more equitable along certain kinds of lines.
So it's always important for me to be a force that is inserting into the conversation that we have to think about inclusion. I frequently hear other kinds of acronyms that include justice and belonging. Those haven't resonated with me in quite the same way, because I think it's really hard to legislate either of those, right?
I think justice is an ideal, and I think it's something to which we should all aspire, but it's very hard to codify that into policies and practices that are realistic and that folks can respond to. And in the same way, belonging - there's so many things that factor into that, but, you know, again, you can't impel people to embrace other people, right?
What you can control in the workplace is what is allowed, right? What kind of guardrails you have up and what sort of values you're privileging. And, and that sort of pragmatic take is something that I think is really, really crucial because that's how you do it, right? And I think the grasping for the how is a very common thing that I hear across my work.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Yeah I would agree with that actually, and I think about belonging in the workplace and oftentimes when I do like workshops or trainings on psychological safety, when I really kind of look at it, it's like psychological safety really is like a very clinical or scientific term to describe belonging. Honestly, like when you think about being able to bring your full self into the workplace.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
It's the way that it's being marketed like a little bit differently, especially in like more corporate spaces that I go into and work in. It's like, why are we so afraid of that piece? But I really loved what you said too about justice and it being very hard to make that like a policy, procedures, like in the workplaces.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Yeah.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
And so often, thinking about it from an institutional standpoint, a lot of it really is what can you create a smart goal on? W hat's something that you can reverse engineer to be able to go, okay, so these are the measurable steps that I can put in place to say, okay, this is what the company is doing in these areas.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
And so when I first heard of your name, you were at Mellon at that time already.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
And then I saw your name again because we were doing some work with the Dream Unfinished and you were on the board there.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
So this is probably going back quite a few, like a few years I guess now But, you, you mentioned too, like, just how vast your different experiences are, but there does, to me, seem to be that throughline of idea. That throughline of equity, in the work that it is that you're doing. When did you first start to develop that sense of this is really the North star in the work that I'm gonna do, whether it's nonprofit or philanthropy, or even higher education? When did that first start to sort of develop for you?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
I think I was really starting to think about it in middle school, and being in orchestra and being able to count the number of us who were of color, right? In a part of the country where that sort of demographic rightsizing was not hard to get to. Right. And I really started thinking about where are we? There are so many of us who are interested in the arts, who participate in the arts . Across sectors we are the biggest artists in the world. Where are we? Right? Where are we in a lot of these rooms? And I just started talking to people as much as I could. And, you know, as a, as a middle school student, obviously I didn't have any of the theoretical underpinnings of what was actually happening. I was just making observations and looking for opportunities to work with or under people who were seeing the same things that I was and we're interested in some kind of way of redressing that, I started to notice that those were the kinds of opportunities I would gravitate towards, right? And that was the case across all of my artistic practice. And when I got to college, a friend suggested to me, because I talked about this all the time, that I think about starting my own company where I could focus on producing the kinds of works by the kinds of artists and work with the kinds of artists that I wanted to and also be able to reframe what the conversation was.
And you know, Lin-Manuel Miranda and I are the same age. I think he's like two weeks older than I am, right? So this was before Hamilton happened in the theater. And that is certainly not to imply that EDI work started with Hamilton, but I do think it changed a conversation for a lot of people because people really started to wrestle with the profitability of representation in a different way. But those 10 years that I ran the theater company, it really did feel like a very long process of inventing and then reinventing and then reinventing the wheel because there was not the kind of momentum behind representation and inclusion and making the connections between who is on stage, who is behind the scenes, and who is in the audience in the way that there is right now.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Oh, thank you so much for sharing that and yeah, that piece of it is so important. And I'm starting to look at the work, like specifically like theater, I'm starting to look at it from a slightly different perspective. Like originally, coming in as like an actor and doing that -
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
For like, you know, in high school and in college and somewhat professionally, you know, here and there. And, looking at it now more from the eyes of a producer and what does that mean? You know? Because if, first of all, like they say, if it's not on the page, it's not on the stage. But at the same time, you know, who is making financial pathways for it to be on the stage? Like a writer, a playwright can put it together, but you know, there has to be some support. And so thinking about it in, in that way and, and yeah, you're, you're absolutely correct. It takes an entire ecosystem, especially for our types of work to live and, so, having people at all different levels, you know, moving towards that same goal is so important. And I would agree that there's so many different exciting new works. You talk about black queerness, I mean, there's so many like works that are coming out or that are out right now that are just like mind blowing. I'm like, what? You know, where was this like 10, 20 years ago? You know what I mean? Like, it would've been a very different experience if I saw this at like, you know, 15, 16, you know, 21.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, maybe to that point, I feel like the boundaries between the different artistic disciplines have become much more porous in the last several years. Right? And we're not in the situation anymore where someone may go to a conservatory, train to do opera and that's all they do. You know, you have people moving through and there's a different way the disciplines can influence each other. And, and I think that to me is what ultimately said, okay, I've been working a lot in theater. I really want to also start touching opera, classical music, concert dance again, and not just as a practitioner, but as a thinker. Because if we can move the needle in some of these areas, it becomes very powerful evidence to other fields. Well, wait a minute. Look how well they're doing. Right? Look what happened when they really started to invest in creators and directors and choreographers and conductors of color. Look how it really moved conversations through. So I'm, you know, in some ways I'm really heartened by that and moving to Lincoln Center, it’s the first place I've worked where we actually have our fingers in all of the disciplines. It's really heartening to think that there is a little bit of momentum.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Oh, so let's, let's, let's go into Lincoln Center. So, newly appointed Chief Education Officer, right? That's like the official title?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
90 days in today. Yes.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Well, congratulations.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Thank you.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Coming from someone who worked there, at Lincoln Center, you know, 90 days is not easy, let me tell you. Especially at that type of position, it is not, so congratulations for that.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Thank you.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
So, in the first 90 days, there on the job, what have been some of your early successes so far?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Um, you know, surviving, I think is, uh, not a small one. Being able to introduce a new set of collaborators and partners, institutional partners, and also individuals, has been absolutely invaluable. I think Henry Timms the President and Shanta Thake the Artistic Director, in the time that they were there before I got there, did extraordinary work on sort of wresting from the minds of our constituents and community members that we are only invested in the fine arts and, you know, the classical pieces, and instead saying that, you know, we're here to represent all New Yorkers artistically, gave me a lot of license to think differently about with whom we're in conversation and what that means for the kinds of conversations we can have. And then I think having the space to be able to articulate with clarity and support and yes, resources, the kinds of progressive values that are pushing back around a lot of really deleterious practices that have existed in the space for a really long time has been very important to me. To be able to come into Lincoln Center and say, I really wanna push back against, the ways that various canons are colonized or the ways that a lot of pedagogy and theater, dance and vocal music is really gendered in a moment where we're asking questions about the very nature of gender right, and really being able to say that any sort of artistic practice that doesn't take into consideration that there are people with disabilities and people who are neurodiverse are practices that are not ones for the future.
That's really meaningful to me and I love being in a space where I can both ask these questions and propose answers and have the support to do a thing about them.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Oh yeah. I love that. And I guess just to kind of stay on that a little bit, when they think about your role and education, are they thinking about like the educational components or tie-ins to like shows that go along with like, say, Mostly Mozart or Lincoln Center Out Of Doors?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Or is it hyper focused on, like what used to be at one point, Lincoln Center Education and thinking about the work with teaching artists or out in schools ? Or is it like all of these things now under your purview, as Chief Education Officer?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
It's the latter and I think what this role was going to be and how it was going to be constructed was speaking to that, right? Both the need to think about how we wield the imprimatur of the institution and signal to the fields that we represent, here's what is important, how we infuse that with research and pedagogy and curricula that actually can make some difference here. And also how we think about what it means to do this work in a way that's not exclusively focused on that sort of in school piece. Right? That's certainly still a part of what we do but that's not the only place where an intervention is necessary. Right? And having the space to say the educational pieces need to touch everybody, not just kids in public schools but literally every single one of us, including the general public. Like there is a piece of advocacy around why arts education matters that I think really needs to happen.
I think you, you talk about arts education, right? And there's this image in a lot of our heads that there's some talented, well-meaning violist who's being dispatched into a public school and is playing some piece and the fourth graders may or may not care. Right? And what kind of return on investment is that? I think that's challenging when we as a society are not consistently connected to that kind of a framework for our own arts, and yet, and still, we live in a country where people will spend their last dollar earmarked for rent to go see Beyonce. Right? Quite literally. You hear people talking about that all the time. So we clearly value art. We clearly value music, right? So I think that is a thing that we really have to think through. What does it mean to be this kind of a society where we invest so much in music and movies and, and how we communicate who we are? A lot of our values seemingly repose in these places, and we're not connecting that to how we're training artists whatsoever, right? There's something frequently very haphazard about it. And there's also, uh, I think in some instances a trepidation around the idea of training because there's so much in our head that's like this conservatory model that ultimately doesn't get to where we want it to be. So part of what I'm interested in is expanding that. What is arts education, right? Why is it important and even in the most traditional sense, that can still create for you a Lizzo, right? Like this isn't just about reconstituting orchestras or keeping opera alive, which I think are really important goals, but it really goes to the kind of cultural footprint that we're interested in leaving for posterity. And as an historian, I am really invested in, like, what that cultural footprint ultimately is.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, I love that piece about it. And the possibilities are really kind of endless when you really think about it. Because as cultural producers, black and brown and indigenous folk, you know, what we can do is very much so endless. I think about even just, like, hip hop alone, right?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
And when I say hip hop, not just hip hop music, but just thinking about hip hop culture and all of the different, like, art forms that are offshoots of that. Or you think about even just, like, entrepreneurship and the creativity that lies there within it. And it's exactly what you're saying. Once you match those resources, with that, Access piece. It really does become limitless what a person can go on and do and go and become. And yeah, Lizzo is a great example because of the classical training. You know, along with just like the creativity and, and free flow of it all.
So let me ask you this question. So one thing that I noticed too is that board service has been something that you've really committed yourself to for, you know, a pretty significant portion of your career up to this point.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Yeah.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
What does that mean to you to serve on boards and, I mean, you started a lot of your board work like a decade ago. Where does this board work come in at for you? And why are you so committed to service in that way?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
I was raised by people who themselves were very committed to service and had a very keen understanding of the need to give back to your communities because none of us is successful simply by the force of our own will. Right? And when you're thinking about what it means to give back to your community, there's so many permutations around how you define community. And one of the things that I've had the opportunity to do through working with boards especially with, you know, grassroots or community based organizations, there's a type of work, a type of connection they can make, especially in the arts that your large, anchor cultural organizations can't do in quite the same way with their need to sort of represent a city or an artistic discipline. And then I think beyond that, I think there is a way to be able to communicate a set of ideas to a number of different individuals and organizations working together to construct and realize a set of goals. Right?
So throughout my career, you know, being on the boards of really seemingly disparate organizations like the Dream Unfinished or Luna Composition Lab or Harmony Theater or the Black Feminist Project. Programs that don't seem like they're doing the same thing, have the same set of underlying values.
And I've been able to connect a lot of these organizations with each other, with my personal network, whatever resources that I am aware exist because so many of the goals are the same and they're really rooted in this piece around representation. And then, appreciative inclusion. Right? And these are things that I think need to be communicated across organizations and across sectors because again, of the porousness. None of us is, you know, a person that only cares about or does one thing right? I had a lovely conversation with a colleague just a few days ago about connections between some of the work that I was doing and what was happening in the NFL draft. And it is a well known fact among people who know me that I avoid sports like the plague. I do not have a mind for it, or any kind of interest in anything about, you know, people bouncing, throwing, tossing, or hitting balls, and yet, I really did get to understand that a lot of the work around inclusion, diversity, equity, and access that is so important to me also manifests itself in sports and has a very different cadence in football, for instance, where we are overrepresented and still don't have equity and representation in certain areas. Right? So I think it all matters because America has some challenges.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Yeah. Yeah, it sure does. And oftentimes the more money is involved, the more challenges that come along with it, you know?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Bingo.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
And the NFL got a lot of that. Lot of that wealth over there, those owners at least. So, so what's next? What's next for Lee Bynum? I mean, I know 90 days in at where you are now, but, you're not the kind of person that is only doing one thing at a time. So what's next that people can look out for?
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned a bit about hip hop a little while ago and I'm really looking forward to developing hip hop education at Lincoln Center. We have really started thinking very differently about this as an important core American art form and it's being presented on our stages and receiving the type of response that, as a person who grew up loving the art form, I am sort of over the moon about getting to see. And then beyond that, going back to my roots in philanthropy, I'll be teaching at the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University a required course on the ethics of grantmaking and another conversation for another day is the wild lawlessness of philanthropy.
It is an unregulated field that has tremendous capacity to do good, but just as much potential to reify things that are inequitable on their face. And I really like this idea of being able to offer people a framework for thinking about what does it mean to be ethical and equitable when you are wielding large sums of money that have the potential to affect, you know, how society functions.
So I am really grateful for this opportunity to get to work with that field which has so much influence in the areas where I work, and, you know, do so with a cohort of really brilliant, thoughtful folks who are, many of whom are people of color and queer people. So I feel like there, that may represent a bit of a change and it won't be the kind of philanthropic industrial complex that I experienced during my 10 years in the industry.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Ooh, well, I know some people who should take that class. I'm just putting out things. I know whole foundations that I would recommend, you know, purchase like a corporate package or something. Well, Lee, I just wanna say thank you so much, for being on and thank you for doing the good work. I'm really excited about what's to come out of your office there and hearing this piece on hip hop education, but just everything that you have going on and I know the level of criticality that you're bringing to the work. I'm really excited about the future of education at Lincoln Center. So, thank you so much again for being on and for doing the good work.
Dr. Lee Bynum:
Thank you, Dr. Cooper. I really appreciate your having me. And also thank you for the work that you do. It changes people, it changes organizations and it changes what's possible. So, stay strong because I know it is not easy working in the space in which you work, but you have a lot of people on this side who are absolutely supporting what you do as well.
Dr. Durell Cooper:
Thank you. It's all love. Thank you.
