Lenora Inez Brown is a Senior Fellow with Cleveland Leadership Center (CLC) and the Director of Advanced Leadership Institute: Inspired by Carl and Louis Stokes.
Prior to joining CLC, she served as the Manager for Community Engagement at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. While there, she established new relationships in the community and built new programs including: Sensory Friendly Day for those with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their families; Deaf and Hard of Hearing History Day; and The Glenville Project a public-private partnership focused on re-introducing native plants to land areas in Glenville. She also managed the Library Pass Program and increased usage 52% in 18 months.
Lenora has worked in Higher Education at Northeast Ohio Medical University as a Special Projects Analyst and Manager of the NEOMED-CSU Partnership and at Chicago’s DePaul University as an Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. She has authored a book chapters, including a chapter on Cleveland native Adrienne Kennedy in Bloomsbury/Methuen’s series Decades of Modern American Drama Volume 6: Playwriting in the 1960s. Her two dramaturgy texts are titled: New Play Development: Facilitating Creativity for Dramaturgs, Playwrights, and Everyone Else and The Art of Active Dramaturgy: Transforming Critical Thought into Dramatic Action.
In addition to consulting with Chicago’s Lyric Opera and the Chicago Humanities Festival she served as a member of the artistic team and a project dramaturg for The Sundance Theatre Labs 2000 and 2001. She is a past president of the Theatre for Young Audiences/USA board and the ASSITEJ 2011 Congress Advisory Committee.
She currently serves on the Education Advisory Board for the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning, Cleveland’s Young Audiences affiliate. She holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama, and an MBA from Cleveland State University, where she received honors and the EMBA John Baker award for leadership, business ethics, and career development.