MAM/MEIM Newsletter

THANK YOU - Daniel J. MARTIN

In June 2022, I retired from Carnegie Mellon after 30 years at this remarkable institution. This first year of retirement offered me the opportunity to reflect on my adventures across several domains within the university, and to more fully understand how blessed I was to have joined the CMU community. Among those many blessings, the most meaningful is the wonderful people I came to know over three decades.

At the the top of my list are the more than 1,000 of you who joined us as students during my years as director and teacher within the Master of Arts Management (MAM) and Master of Entertainment Industry Management (MEIM) programs. Nothing has meant more to me than the experience of teaching to – and learning from – all of you. I am in such awe of what you have accomplished, and I continue to be excited about the promise of what is to come from you as your careers progress, wherever life takes you. I appreciate the faith you placed in us to help you develop a foundation for your professional pursuits and I admire the energy and passion you invested in your education.

I am extremely grateful to the many faculty and staff members who engaged with the MAM and MEIM programs over the years. There are far too many to name everyone here, but I must cite Jessica Bowser Acrie, Jerry Coltin, Brett Crawford, Dan Green, Kathryn Heidemann, and John Tarnoff for their indefatigable leadership of the programs and their support of our students and alumni. I am proud of what we accomplished together during my tenure at Carnegie Mellon, and I deeply appreciate how thoughtfully and skillfully these leaders continue to anticipate and respond to the emerging opportunities and challenges impacting the culture and entertainment sectors in order to keep our programs at the leading edge of creative enterprise management education.

I came to CMU to lead a young and not-yet-fully realized academic program. With my partners inside the university and the leaders of arts, culture, and heritage institutions around the country, we broadened the curriculum and brought a sharp focus on the challenges of leadership in the not-for-profit arts and culture sector. Our efforts and the quality of students who joined us catapulted the MAM Program into one of the leading graduate programs in our field. Recognizing the potential impact of emerging technology on cultural institutions, I pulled together a team to explore ways to integrate it into the management, fundraising, and marketing efforts of cultural organizations. We created the Center for Arts Management and Technology (CAMT) as an applied research and educational resource that benefitted hundreds, if not thousands, of arts leaders and their institutions. We are proud to have created the very first digital grant application system, and I will be forever grateful for the collaboration with Philip Horn, then executive director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, who was so instrumental in helping us develop the eGrant system.

I am indebted to university leadership who allowed me to pursue the establishment of the MEIM Program with its unusual bi-located presence and operating structure. Though it was met with some skepticism by the film and television industry and by peer institutions in LA when it was first launched, the MEIM Program quickly became a respected and leading source of well-educated graduates and applied research -- and a couple of those LA-based institutions have since ‘emulated’ several elements of our curriculum. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!)

None of what we achieved in my first two decades here would have been possible without the wonderful support of Heinz College leadership: Brenda Peyser, Mark Kamlet, and Mark Wessel.

Stepping into the role of dean of the College of Fine Arts in 2010 was bittersweet for me. I was honored and thrilled to be able to serve an even larger community of faculty, staff, and students committed to creative expression, social commentary, and the development of new culture, but I was saddened to be moving away from my day-to-day involvement with the MAM and MEIM programs. The MAM and MEIM programs and the students were never far from my thoughts, and I made every effort to support them during my decade as dean.

I have an overabundance of wonderful memories of our students, alumni, and CAMT staff and clients, international colleagues, and the arts and entertainment sector executives with whom we collaborated.

Of all that I was fortunate enough to experience across my half-century career in the creative industries, my time at Carnegie Mellon has meant the most to me and it has been the most satisfying. Again, I cannot tell you how grateful I am to all of you who invested in an education with us and to all of those with whom I worked in the MAM and MEIM programs.

It would be a great pleasure to hear about your accomplishments and your dreams for the years ahead. My university email account, djmartin@cmu.edu, remains active. Keep in touch!