Richard J. Deasy is the director of the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), a coalition of over 100 education, arts, business, philanthropic, and government organizations that demonstrates and promote the essential role of arts education in enabling all students to succeed in school, life, and work. Under his leadership AEP has published seminal research studies and reports that are credited with major advances in arts education in the United States. He commissioned and edited AEP’s widely acclaimed compendium of research, Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development, and most recently commissioned the research and co-authored the resulting book Third Space: When Learning Matters, a study of the transformative effects of the arts in high poverty schools. Mr. Deasy has been a senior state education official in Maryland and Pennsylvania, president and CEO of the National Council for International Visitors, and a prize-winning reporter on politics and government in Philadelphia and the surrounding metropolitan area. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on slum housing conditions in suburban Philadelphia.