The Office for the Arts at Harvard is hosting a luncheon for students in arts, cultural and civic organizations as an opportunity to meet OFA program leaders and engage in conversations around the future of the OFA. Special guest speaker will be Jenn Chang '07, violist and White House Liaison and Senior Advisor at the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Student leaders and their teams are encouraged to attend! RSVP in advance.  

This is an exciting year for the OFA as we continue to celebrate our 50th anniversary, welcome new leadership and prepare for new programming. Our recently published strategic plan guides our office as we look forward to 2024-2025 and beyond. We want to center our work on student voice and inclusion and recognize that students’ valuable perspectives will be crucial to this work.  

At this leadership luncheon the OFA will share more information about:  

• Student grant programs, including a new innovative, intersectional and collaborative fund 
• A new Student Ambassador pilot program 
• The Arts Equity initiative of the OFA, for which we welcome new ideas and voices 

More about the featured speaker:

Jenn Chang joined the Biden Administration in January 2021, serving as the White House Liaison and Senior Advisor to the Chair at the National Endowment for the Arts. In this role, she helps advance equity and inclusion, health and well-being, social cohesion, and civic engagement through the arts. As the NEA’s primary partner to the White House, she works with the Domestic Policy Council on an all-of-government arts and culture integration strategy and the Office of Presidential Personnel on political appointments. She recruited and onboarded 11 new members of the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s Senate-confirmed governing board. She was a lead designer of the NEA’s American Rescue Plan grant program, which distributed $135 million to organizations nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was instrumental in creating the NEA’s flagship Summit on arts integration policy, co-hosted with the White House, called “Healing, Bridging, Thriving: the Arts and Culture in Our Communities.” She also helped establish and design ArtsHERE, the NEA’s first equity-focused grant program, in partnership with the 6 Regional Arts Organizations.

 Jenn joined the NEA after working on the appointments team with the Biden-Harris Transition. Prior to that, she worked as an associated consultant at WolfBrown, designing organizational strategies and conducting research for arts and education clients. She spent over a decade at Google, where she worked in Strategy and Operations across Google Fiber, AdWords, and Grow With Google. At Google, her roles included oversight of a Learning and Development program for 150 employees across 12 offices, and serving on Google Fiber’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion task force. In 2016, she took a sabbatical to serve as the Expansion States Operations Director at Hillary for America, where she oversaw logistics for 37 states.

 While working part-time at Google, Jenn received her Master's degree in viola performance from The Juilliard School, studying with Heidi Castleman and Misha Amory. Performance venue highlights include the MoMA sculpture garden, Dizzy’s Jazz Club and Carnegie Hall in New York, Jordan Hall in Boston, the State Department in Washington, D.C., and Cafe Revolution in San Francisco. Jenn has served on the boards of the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble and Greenwood Music Camp, where she co-chaired the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. A graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Social Studies, Jenn wrote her senior thesis on El Sistema, a national youth orchestra program in Venezuela.