Remembering Our Friend Diane Ragsdale

In January 2024, the theatre community lost Diane Ragsdale, whose wide-ranging career as a foundation program officer, presenter, educator, and thought leader touched many. David Dower and the HowlRound team convened an invited group for a virtual memorial service where folks shared their memories of Diane and the places they saw her impact. Below is a lightly edited transcript of these first responses, curated by Dower, before the floor was opened to all. 

David Dower: Susan, bring us into Diane's impact on the Mellon Foundation and your earliest interactions with her.

Susan Feder: Can you all remember when you first met Diane? I remember distinctly. I was hired at Mellon in December of 2006, having been brought on firstly to shut down a large investment in the orchestra field that had gone awry. One day I came in to sign some papers, and the vice president said, “I want you to meet Diane Ragsdale. We've just promoted her from senior program associate to program officer.” We sat opposite each other on sofas in an enormous office that was larger than some apartments I‘ve lived in, and Diane and I started chatting. Soon we were exchanging ideas at rapid fire: comparing notes on theatre, shows we'd seen, orchestras, and the state of the performing arts field. I left the meeting just gobsmacked and delighted.

Diane was already beginning to implement changes that would happen during this next phase at Mellon. She was so clear in her thinking that they must be done with dignity. Diane’s work begot other things, from one wonderful thing to another. Closing down the National Theatre Program meant we could start working on new play development. We had a convening with the people running developmental centers and soon thereafter started funding those developmental centers.

This symbiosis, this reaching out, this exploring what didn't exist but could exist with imagination and incubation, really characterized Diane's tenure. The collaboration, the deep thinking, the generosity of spirit were all probably new to Mellon—and I characterize that as coming from Diane principally.

David: From the beginning she understood the asset and the power, and it's so interesting that that we never felt that as our relationship to her. It was always, “What do I have to offer? Oh, I have a big bag of money. Let's be smart about it.”

Then, when Susan got there, things got much more organized and strategic and programmatic.

Olga, you're the reason I met her. Could you talk a little bit about your own ride in the Diane Ragsdale universe?

Olga Garay-English: Sure. Thank you.

I met Diane when she had transitioned to On the Boards in Seattle, and at that time I was at Miami-Dade College. On the Boards and Miami-Dade College were both partners in the National Performance Network, another fountain of inspiration and collaboration and deep self-evaluation.

When she got the job at Mellon, I had already been at the Doris Duke Foundation for a couple of years. I was actually pretty dismayed when I got to New York City from Miami because I'm naturally a collaborative person. That's the way that we survive in the performing arts field, right? You pull resources together to make connections and bring projects to fruition. That wasn't the case in the philanthropic community in New York City. It wasn't like, “How do we strategically join forces to serve the field, to serve the constituents?”

The word that comes to me when I think about Diane is “generosity”—this curiosity, but also the synthesis, having an omnivorous approach to the idea that it is an ecosystem.

So to have someone else at a major philanthropy that had been in the in the field and had had to wake up in the middle of the night and say, “How am I going to make payroll?”… Having someone now in the foundation community that was all too familiar with the kind of stress and endless challenges in our sector was a breath of fresh air.

It's not about putting up walls between foundation resources and the field. I know that Diane intrinsically understood that.

I think that that the philanthropic community, after the murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest, is beginning to analyze itself and figure out where it's fallen short. However, now some of these funders are going back to the old ways. So, I would use this as a clarion call on Diane's behalf to issue a challenge to funders to say, “How do we embrace the very people and the very organizations that we're here to serve?”

David: That is so powerful to me. There's a hole now, and I need to come back for myself and on behalf of her. There was so much space that she was holding in terms of our shared responsibility: keeping us as a community of people who are generous and smart and strategic and passionate.

Meiyin, you would come in kind of as a next generation from Susan and Olga. As Diane walked in the room, can you talk a little bit about the impact for you?

Meiyin Wang: So I started at Under the Radar in July 2006. So, as I'm listening to a little bit of a timeline, I'm understanding that I was starting at the Public and Under the Radar at the same time that Diane was starting at Mellon, which is a bit of a click for me.

Mellon—Diane and Katie [Steger] and Susan—were a huge part of the growth and the direction of Under the Radar and the separate programs have arisen out of Under the Radar. I remember those grant proposals. I remember the request for edits and more edits, being guided by many folks, and of course by Diane, to really sharpen and focus on the strategy and the request.

The word that comes to me when I think about Diane is “generosity”—this curiosity, but also the synthesis, having an omnivorous approach to the idea that it is an ecosystem.

I was always just so impressed and inspired by her approach and her synthesis with Under the Radar. It was this time of growth: “And what else could it be? And how could it support the network? And how could it support the ecosystem?” She was very much of that conversation.

And you know, after Mellon, she was doing work with different students. She was in Wisconsin teaching business students about aesthetics and beauty, right? Again, I go back to this thing of expanding the circle. It's not just about the arts; it’s how we're actually expanding the value and the curiosity and the creativity. We are all part of this larger question of how our aesthetics can be part of influencing the world, not just in performance, but one-on-one, in academia, in business.

David: Thank you. Synthesis. That's a beautiful, beautiful way to think this morning.

Fay, are you in a place where you can pick up that thread?

Fay Nass: Thanks for inviting me here.

I met Diane at the Banff Center [for Arts and Creativity] in 2019. I was doing cultural leadership with her. It was incredible for me, meeting Diane was truly seeing a leader that cared about art and culture, humanity, and bringing new inclusive ways of thinking about leadership. Her values really resonated with me. 
Meeting Diane was not only validation of the ways I have led, but it was kind of like coming back to home or to self through her words and her leadership. It inspired me, it anchored me, and it motivated me. 

Diane, saw things the way others couldn’t. I remember sharing this really short Iranian story with some of the other leaders I was working with as a reflection on collaborative leadership. I remember some of them were kind of like, “Okay, so what was your reflection?” And when I shared it with Diane it was a completely different kind of bonding experience between us. She understood it. She was touched by it. She was able to see the nonlinear and non-Western way in which the story was talking about sharing knowledge and power. 

It was a story about an elder and a young boy. They go from town to town. In one of the towns the elder tells the young boy, “You should make sure to shake hands with every single person you meet in this town.” The young boy asks, “Why is that?” and Elder says, “Because one of those people may be a prophet, and if you shake hand with a prophet, you may have fortune for the rest of your life.” The young boy says “Oh, well all these people in this town, they are poor of knowledge, poor with finances. Why doesn't the prophet say, ‘I am a prophet’ so everyone can shake hands with them?” And the elder says, “Because the prophet himself does not know that he's a prophet.” 
I think that is who Diane is and was, sharing her knowledge and her generosity and creating these international connections. Whoever she met and touched in any level, she transformed and changed. A lot of us shook hands with her, and we are all lucky.

David: Yes, we are lucky, and it was quite a handshake.

The conversation continues [through] so many generations, and I'm gonna go again to a generation that followed. Since she passed, many people have reached out and said, “I wouldn't have had a career if it wasn't for Diane. I wouldn't be in the theatre if it wasn't for Diane.”

Kevin, can you speak a little bit to what you've done and how it relates?

Kevin Becerra: Sure, thank you. I find that everywhere I have gone, every room or every group I align myself with, there's some kind of Ragsdale connection. She had either written the report or was writing the report or was a major thought partner in the design.

I met Diane very early in my career at the In the Intersection convening in November of 2011 at Arena Stage, and as you can imagine, there were lot of personalities in that room. A lot of big ideas and bold statements. And in the corner was Diane, wrestling with the questions, kind of quietly meeting with the HowlRound team, thinking about where the conversation was going to go. Now, thanks to Diane, we have the excellent documentation of that of that conversation. What is it to be the one in the room that is provoking conversation and disseminating the learning, not the one speaking the most?

I was an American Voices New Play Institute new play producing fellow with Erin Washington, and we were just sponges of learning. Erin would say, “This person is in the building. We have to sit them down and talk to them.” Diane was one of those people.

Work eventually brought me to Boston, working with ArtsEmerson and collaboration with HowlRound and International Presenting Commons, which brought me back to Diane.  

The last thing I'll share about Diane, and this is the thing that I keep thinking of the most, which feels a little silly given her professional impact. My first Thanksgiving in Boston, I didn't really know a lot of people here, and I found myself facing a major holiday kind of unsure where to go. So I texted P. Carl's wife, Lynette, and I said, “Is it okay If I invite myself over to dinner for Thanksgiving?” And she said, “Yes, of course. You know Diane, right?”

And I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Great, So Diane Ragsdale’s coming, and we've committed that it's just going to be a very low-key evening.” And of course we talked about ideas, and we talked about the theatre, and we talked about arts ecosystems. But then we talked about, the merits of watching movies like, Uncle Buck after eating a Thanksgiving meal. It really was a key moment to me feeling at home here, and I'll always link that to her.

That was something that Diane was quite passionate about: helping artists think about what it means to be leaders and helping leaders think about art.

David: Thank you. Mara, can you take us from that conversation to the New School and her work?

Mara Isaacs: Sure. I was also in that in that big personality convening that Kevin so accurately described. I've actually gone back and looked at that report repeatedly over the years, and so many of Diane's observations and synthesizing have been touchstones for me.

I also first met Diane through her work at Mellon when Diane and Susan were working together.

Over the years, Diane and I would often talk about our shared experience, even though we were doing very different things: this idea of being independent, working outside of institutions, having a kind of maverick approach to thinking about how we consider work, how we make work, how we find alternate pathways to do what it is we do. That was a conversation that she and I would often have.

So, it felt like a natural progression when she started at the New School. You know, there's been considerable discussion about how we're training arts leaders and the limited academic opportunities that are available for them, and most of the programs are very conventional in their structure. They're churning out a lot of managers, but they're not really churning out creative entrepreneurs. That was something that Diane was quite passionate about: helping artists think about what it means to be leaders and helping leaders think about art. So at the New School she created what's called the [Arts Management and Entrepreneurship] program. The students were this really interesting group of art makers primarily. You could watch their minds cracking open as Diane was leading them through a process where they would really think about kind of big keystone projects that either they would make as art makers or facilitate as entrepreneurs and leaders.

 She brought me into that program. She brought Todd London into that program. It was truly ripe with so much potential. She was deeply committed to training a generation of people to think differently about how to lead in the arts.

We also had many of these conversations about big ideas, and then we would spend a lot of time talking about being middle aged women and marriage and all of those other things. So it was a wonderful, complex, gorgeous friendship and colleagueship, and I am just having a hard time believing that's not going to happen anymore.

David: You talk about new leaders. Katie, you wanna jump in here?

Katie Steger: Thanks, David. Yeah, I do.

I think Diane is so much the reason why I ever was connected to any of you and why many of us were ever connected to each other. A forte of hers was organizing the most amazing rooms of people to spark the most fruitful conversations that would just fuel you.

I'm not sure she ever really understood how important she was to so many people. I've always felt like she was the moral compass for me, for the field. Whatever doubts she had, and I believe that she had many doubts on the inside, the importance of the pursuit of truth was not one of them. She always inherently knew what true North was, and she was not going to stray from that.

As a result, she would very confidently call people to account and take people to task. She also understood fairness and kindness, even in telling people hard things. I feel like she shaped so much of who I am professionally, but also personally, and I'm really grateful.

I want to share a thing that happened at the funeral yesterday. So many people got up to speak, and they all came from different eras of her life and her career. And at the end, sort of last minute, one of her students got up and described this exercise that Diane had them do, which was to go out into their communities with no distraction—no pen, no paper, no phone, no anything—and find a broken place in their community that needed tending, had been abandoned, and sit in the broken place for thirty minutes and just reflect. The takeaway from that exercise was to turn in instead of turning away. I think that's what Diane always did when there was a hard problem. She refused to turn away from it. She always turned into it and asked the question: What now? What next? How do we move forward? How do we solve this? Maybe we can't solve this, but how do we make it better? How do we work together? Who do we bring to the table? How do we make space for people at the table?

And she always made space for people; it didn't matter who you were. She just believed in people and always tried to get the best out of them. So the loss is so enormous.

Diane knew how much she was admired, but I think she would have been astonished by this outpouring of affection and grieving that has followed her death. We all know that she deserved it in spades.

David: We didn't get the story all the way to the Netherlands. Susan, can you speak to that?

Susan: Thanksgiving 2009, Diane went to Amsterdam for a long weekend and attended a lecture on cultural economics by a leading Dutch cultural economist, Jaap Boter. After the lecture she went up and introduced herself, and she dazzled him as much as he had dazzled her. For the next six months, theirs was a commuting love story. It's important to say that when she left the Mellon Foundation the next summer— a job she loved, with people she loved, in a city she loved—she left for love.

She moved to a place where even though everybody spoke English, it was foreign for her. A year later she and Jaap married, and, damn it, she worked so hard at that marriage. There were two stepdaughters, and she worked as hard as she could to ingratiate herself into the Boter family life.

Diane began a dissertation at Erasmus University. It was unlike American graduate education, and there wasn't a lot of understanding of her subject matter or the big questions she was asking. Erasmus had her teach, and somebody quickly realized this was a woman that put her all into everything she did, so they took advantage of that. She had more classes than anybody. She had more students than anybody. She worked harder than anybody.

She worked at becoming a wife, a mother, a student. I believe we have the Jumper blog because Diane was so worried we would all forget her. She needed to connect with us publicly and hear back from us. To have that written legacy is such a gift from Doug McLennan and  ArtsJournal.

Diane turned down a number of positions in Europe that would have allowed her to be the public intellectual she was and get paid for it. Despite various international keynote addresses and periodic teaching or consulting stints in North America, she found the time abroad harder and harder. I think she had expectations that as her stepdaughters grew older, she would be able to spend more time in the States with Jaap. That wasn't proving to be the case, and she eventually made that very, very brave decision to come back.

I want to bring love back into this conversation. Diane knew how much she was admired, but I think she would have been astonished by this outpouring of affection and grieving that has followed her death. We all know that she deserved it in spades.

I hope that I captured her time in in the Netherlands. Oh, and she learned Dutch, and became a Dutch citizen. That was Diane. 200 percent.

David: Thank you. Well, this has been really important for me and for others of you as well. I just appreciate all of you and all of us.

And Diane, thank you.