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Michele Snyder, M.A. Arts Management, '98,

Growing up in the small town of Greenville, Pa., Michele Snyder didn’t have Hall of Fame aspirations; she simply wanted to follow her passions for writing and art.

After studying English literature and studio art at local Thiel College, Snyder began exploring ways her love for the arts could be shaped into a career.

“I was shopping around for a graduate program,” she said. “There are a lot of opportunities in the arts in Washington, both large and small, and I was really attracted to AU.”

Snyder earned a degree from AU’s arts management program in 1998 and has gone on to a career in development and public relations in the art world. An avid supporter of the arts who has lobbied Congress to increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and other arts organizations, Snyder has been named the 2007 inductee to AU’s Department of Performing Arts (DPA) Hall of Fame.

“She’s made enormous contributions to the arts, and she’s an exemplary role model,” DPA chair Gail Humphries Mardirosian said of Snyder. “She is an extraordinary woman and a true leader.”

As a Hall of Fame inductee, Snyder’s name will be engraved in a plaque hanging in the Greenberg Theatre lobby, and she will deliver a lecture on campus in the spring. She also was awarded a $250 honorarium, which she donated to the DPA.

“I was really honored when I heard,” Snyder said of the honor. “I got a great foundation at AU. I really got an understanding of what a nonprofit is and how it works in every aspect from public relations to fund raising.”

Snyder wrote her thesis on Primary Movers, a small Washington-based dance company she discovered when its director spoke to her class. After graduating, she landed the prestigious Edward John
Noble Foundation Fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There she worked in the development office writing grants and tending to corporate sponsorships.

Now director of development for the New York-based College Arts Association, an international nonprofit that offers a plethora of services to its member artists, Snyder still keeps a studio in Long Island City. She’s also working on a screenplay.

“It’s great to be honored by a school that really helped me get to where I am today,” she said.

One of those places now is the Hall of Fame.

Amina J. Dickerson, senior director of corporate contributions for Kraft Foods, brings more than twenty years of experience with museums, arts and education, theater, non-profit institutional development, and community-based arts collaborations. She is responsible for Kraft’s international philanthropic programs in hunger, health and wellness, arts education and environment/sustainability. Previously, she served as a consultant to Kraft, coordinating their groundbreaking arts education initiative, Arts Discovery.


Dickerson worked as both Education Director and Vice President with the Chicago Historical Society (1989-1996), as President of the DuSable Museum of African American History (1985-1989), Assistant Executive Director of Philadelphia’s Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, and Program Director for Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. In 1996, Dickerson was named a Distinguished Visitor with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She was also appointed a Class XVI Kellogg Fellow, and was a Newberry Library fellow (1996-1997). In 2002, she was named Professional Grantor of the Year by the Chicago Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. In 2004, she was received the 10th Annual Sor Juana Award from the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and a legacy award from eta Creative Arts Theater, both in Chicago.


She has served as a panelist and consultant to organizations such as the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities and various private foundations. She has lectured widely, including the International Council of Museums, the Museums Association of the United Kingdom, America’s Second Harvest, and The British American Arts Association, as well as a number of national museums and arts organizations. She serves on the boards of Grantmakers In the Arts, the Arts Education Partnership, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, and the advisory councils of Arts for Learning/Chicago and Urban Gateways.


Ms. Dickerson holds a M.A. in arts management from the American University in Washington, DC. She studied theater arts at Emerson College. She also holds a certificate from the Harvard University program in Arts Administration. A native of Washington, DC., she resides in Chicago’s South Shore community with her husband, Julian Roberts.

Statement from Amina J. Dickerson
American University, Department of Performing Arts
Class of 1988

After many years working directly in the arts, my professional life now operates on a broader stage. At Kraft Foods, my task is to guide the development of our Global Corporate Community Involvement program—encompassing not only our philanthropy but also employee involvement activities in communities throughout the world. To do so successfully, my team must engineer a complex web of effective partnerships with community based and non-governmental organizations, informed by sensitivity to local and national cultural traditions and nurtured by sustained communication with our employees and the civic leadership within their respective communities.


I believe my years of work in the cultural arena have endowed my current vocation in philanthropy with a strong foundation. Over twenty years of work in museums and cultural institutions taught me much about diverse artistic disciplines, afforded many rich occasions to develop collaborations and alliances with civic and community leadership. The arts allowed me to work across functions within respective organizations and taught me much about the intricacies of managing organizations and the talented people who fuel them. My career in the arts created for me a strong cross-cultural sensitivity, knowledge of artistic traditions and a revelatory exposure to artistic trends, theories and practice, all of which often transcend geographic boundaries. Today, traveling globally, I encounter a strong shared visual cultural, particularly as many of the world’s leading architects work globally. Dance, music and exhibitions tour internationally, informing in myriad ways my discourse with international colleagues and potential project partners. And everywhere I journey, individual artists and cultural institutions play a dynamic role in defining the sense of identity and community that are essential to our global society.


While still active in the arts, this has taken a secondary role to my other grantmaking efforts on behalf of Kraft. Today my work places greater focus on other issues: the alleviation of world hunger, programs to promote health and wellness practices and support for environmental sustainability. However, it is my firm belief that it is my education in the arts that has provided me an expressive language and means of communication that is understood around the globe.