Bill Ivey is the Director of the Curb Center at Vanderbilt, an arts policy research center with offices in Nashville, Tennessee and Washington, DC. He also directs the Center’s program for senior government, the Arts Industries Policy Forum. Ivey also serves as Senior Consultant to Leadership Music and is currently President of the American Folklore Society. He chairs the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation and is board chairman of WPLN, Nashville Public Radio. His book about the public interest and America’s cultural system, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed our Cultural Rights, will be published by the University of California Press in the spring of 2008.
From May, 1998 through September, 2001, Ivey served as the seventh Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Following years of controversy and significant reductions to the NEA budget, Ivey’s leadership is credited with restoring Congressional confidence in the work of the NEA. Ivey’s Challenge America Initiative, launched in 1999, has to date garnered more than $20 million in new Congressional appropriations for the Arts Endowment. Prior to government service, Ivey was director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee.