Spoleto Festival USA is back in turmoil
NewsThe festival, founded by the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, has the board at war once more with a bumbling chief executive.
Since (Mark) Hanna took over, nearly all of the nonprofit’s established artistic and business leaders have been replaced. And in recent months the board has seen an exodus, especially since chairwoman Alicia Mullen Gregory was ousted from her leadership position in July. She then chose to leave the organization. In total, 10 board members have resigned…
The crisis has come to a slow boil as revelations of a $600,000 deficit came to light. Demands for an explanation were never met, former board members said…
Full story here.
pictured: Philip Glass playing at Spoleto
There’s nothing in Mr. Hanna’s professional background which is anywhere near similar to the job of being General Director/CEO of a major festival. One wonders why he was hired.
Aside from lacking the necessary qualifications, Mr. Hanna is widely known in the industry for his history of misogynistic behavior. The Board clearly didn’t do their due diligence in vetting him (HGO can attest to that), so the responsibility lies squarely with them.
“pictured: Philip Glass playing at Spoleto”.
And that explains the deficit.
Bring in yuja wang and start making $$$$
And people still scratch their heads wondering why our beloved art form is fading into oblivion. Here’s a clue: two words—terrible leadership.
I just checked the programming for this summers festival and, ugh. Ouch.
Let’s just clarify who this Mark Hanna is (he only started emphasizing his middle name of ‘Mena’ after it clearly began to serve him professionally to be a bit more ethnic). Mark was a mediocre student at Temple University who inexplicably went on to a doctoral program at Oxford, where he distinguished himself mainly by saying he’d been a student at the Curtis Institute and by being in the circle of noted Oxonian anti-Semite and Israel-hater Laurence Dreyfus, who in turn used his connections with Barenboim to get him a job to run Barenboim’s silly little academy. His tenure in that job was mostly marked by incompetence, misogyny, and an inability to even be a factotum for Barenboim, and he mostly used his time to post photos on social media of his supposedly artistic life in Berlin. Now he’s in a job he’s not qualified for. This is Mark Hanna.