Our Distributed Leadership Journey
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In my own experience of transitioning HMD (Hope Mohr Dance) from a historically hierarchical arts organization into a model of distributed leadership, I have discovered that inside stepping back, there is a choice. I can step back and withdraw emotionally. Or I can step aside and stay accountable and engaged. At times, a better image for the work might be stepping to the side: making space for other voices while staying in relationship.
—Hope Mohr, Some Notes on “Stepping Back”
Bridge Live Arts began as Hope Mohr Dance (HMD) / The Bridge Project, led by founder, Hope Mohr in 2008. Informed by her 15 years of community-based curating through The Bridge Project, Hope Mohr wanted to align the organization's leadership structure with longstanding commitments to building artist power. In 2020, she became interested in experimenting with a way to evolve the organization from a founder-led, hierarchical arts nonprofit toward an emerging, shared leadership model.
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Hope Mohr invited Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero, staff members at the time, to become co-curators and co-directors of the organization, and from 2020-2021, the leadership team consulted with LeaderSpring’s Safi Jiroh, HMD/The Bridge Project’s Board of Directors, and numerous community artists to develop a model of Distributed leadership.
Cherie Hill, Karla Quintero, Hope Mohr (L to R), Photo by Ulysses Ortega
In those early days (2020), there was a lot of collaboration and shared decision-making. We would meet to talk about artists we’d want to invite and share videos of their work. The process felt really empowering to be able to make decisions and bring my vision into what the Bridge Project would be this year.
—Cherie Hill, “In Practice: Stepping Back to Move Forward with Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero” by Sima Belmar
Our first co-produced and curated festival, POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, & Community, offered intensives, workshops, and artist interviews highlighting the improvisational practices of Black/African American, Latinx/Latin American, Asian American, female-identifying and queer improvisers and social justice activists.
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Our commitment to equity and anti-racism values grew throughout the pandemic and 2020 racial uprisings. Moved by the voices in our community and each other, we co-curated Anti-Racism in Dance Series (2021), followed by Money in the Arts: Pathways to Equity (2022).
POWER SHIFT: Jarrel Phillips, estrellx supernova, Judith Ruiz Sanchez, sam wentz (L to R), Photos courtesy of artists
Artists involved in Signals from the West: Bay Area Artists in Conversation with Merce Cunningham at 100, curated by Hope Mohr in collaboration with SFMOMA’s Open Space and the Merce Cunningham Trust, as part of HMD’s The Bridge Project. Photo by Hillary Goidell
Programming, decision-making, and cultivating cultural equity are interconnected with the shifts we made internally. With support from LeaderSpring, we updated the organization’s values and co-wrote Equity Commitments, Operating Principles, and a statement on Racial Equity to express the organization’s expansion. We implemented pay equality among staff and the distribution of curatorial & monetary power by hiring an Artist Council. Through transparent dialogue, collective idea generating, and re-distributing power among co-directors, board, and community members, a Distributed Leadership model that supported HMD/the Bridge Project’s core values and decentralized whiteness within the organization emerged.
Bridge Live Arts’ approach to distributed leadership evolved in three strands:
STRAND 1
HMD/The Bridge Project’s three staff members (Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and I) transition to co-directing the Bridge Project.
STRAND 2
Staff and board, in conversation, reimagine the function of the board.
STRAND 3
Staff engage artist partners in decision-making and power-sharing through initiatives like our paid Artist Council in 2020.
Each of these strands is ongoing, and we have by no means arrived at our deepest expression of distributed leadership. Nonetheless, they represent concrete steps toward a more people-centric, equity-driven organizational model.
—Karla Quintero, “Embodying Equity-Driven Change: A Journey from Hierarchy to Shared Leadership,” Artists on Creative Administration
After two years of deep, intentional work, we publicly announced the organization’s new name, Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.). An organization that moved from a white founder-led, hierarchical nonprofit toward an emerging new model of Distributed Leadership. Distributed leadership within B.L.A. continues to evolve, and the organization presents performances, embodied practices, and public dialogues that embrace social justice.
To date, B.L.A. has received national recognition for its work in distributed leadership in the arts including a feature in The New York Times (2023) and The National Center for Choreography – Akron’s publication, Artists On Creative Administration (2024).
Cherie Hill, Karla Quintero, Hope Mohr (L to R), Photo by Ulysses Ortega