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Rebecca L. Lawrence, Director
 Rebecca L. Lawrence, having been appointed by four successive Governors starting in 1996, is in her fourth four-year term as the Director of New Hampshire's state arts agency. She began her work with the agency as Assistant Director in 1987. During her 21 years with the State Arts Council she established the agency's first community arts program and has steadily increased the agency's budget with state funding for initiatives that include a Traditional Arts program and ArtLinks, a community/school partnership program designed to expand and deepen opportunities in the arts for 12- to 19-year-olds.
She was elected to a three-year term on the board of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and continues to serve on the board of the New England Foundation for the Arts. She has been appointed multiple times by the National Endowment for the Arts to serve on state partnership and media arts panels. In 2006, Lawrence was designated one of the Outstanding Women of New Hampshire by Keene State College.
A native of Maine and graduate of Smith College in Art History, she spent 10 years, before returning to New England, in Hawaii where she worked for the Mission Houses Museum and Waipahu Cultural Garden Park (a living museum for sugar plantation history) before becoming a program coordinator for Hawaii's state arts agency.
Before her decade in the Pacific, she worked for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a television producer with WGBH and for the Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio as a museum instructor. While in Boston, she pioneered bringing video art exhibitions to the MFA galleries and contributed to an early anthology of articles on video as art. She has received several awards for her video and television work, including a Chicago-Midwest regional Emmy for Arts on 2, a magazine pilot she produced for Twin Cities Public Television in 1991.
Besides curating two exhibitions based on the state’s art collections, she has written or edited a number of articles and books during her tenure at the State Arts Council, including: Art in Unexpected Places; "Making Do: The Aesthetics of Frugality" (PDF); and Drawing Your Own Conclusions, Government and the Arts: New Hampshire's Story.
Last updated:
May 14, 2008
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