Summary: By David Dower. Today I talk with Bill O'Brien, the Senior Advisor for Program Innovation at the National Endowment for the Arts. This call is one you have to put down what you're doing and really listen to. It doesn't take you where you think it is going to go. Bill and his colleagues are involved in some incredibly big-thinking projects that involve a whole host of surprising collaborators: the military, the National Science Foundation, and schools of journalism to name a few. And the stuff they are doing, in particular, around the research into traumatic brain injury is just amazing to me. Not only the research itself, which is that, but the fact that the NEA has found a role in it and an imperative to be right in the middle of it all. Yes, the agency still has a focus on identifying and supporting excellence in artistic practice, but Bill's role,...
