• Programming
• Leader of the Arts

Shelton G. Stanfill

January 2006

President and CEO, Woodruff Arts Center

Shelton G. Stanfill has put a life long passion for the arts into action by guiding the Woodruff Arts Center to creative and financial success since joining the staff in 1996. It is a legacy of prosperity he has left throughout his career. After serving as director of cultural programs at Colorado State University, he became executive director of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College; then president and chief executive officer of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts near Washington, D.C.; and finally, president of the Music Center of Los Angeles County, the third-largest performing arts center in the country. Highlights of the roughly 12,000 programs presented during his career have included the Bolshoi Opera, Paris Opera Ballet, No Theatre of Japan, The Rolling Stones, Dizzy Gillespie and the Thomas Moran-100 Years of Yellowstone Park Exhibition.

During his tenure at the Woodruff Arts Center, currently the largest visual and performing arts center in the country, Shelton has presided over the most dramatic expansion ever seen by the Woodruff. In 2002, he began the growth process that culminated in 2005 with the addition of the Woodruff’s first new division since 1970, Young Audiences. This merger makes the Woodruff Arts Center the largest PreK-12 arts-in-education provider of any arts center in the country. With this merger, the Woodruff Corporation is now home to five divisions, including the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and High Museum of Art.

Shelton also guided the physical campus expansion which opened in the fall of 2005 and added more than 280,000 square feet in five new buildings in addition to a new parking garage. The campus now totals 1.2 million square feet of exhibition, performance and educational space. This “village for the arts,” designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, more than doubled the High Museum of Art’s space, added a new full-service restaurant to the campus and expanded the size of the Atlanta College of Art. In the future, the campus will expand south to include a new Symphony Center for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra designed by architect Santiago Calatrava with the master plan designed by Cesare Pelli.

One of Shelton’s strongly held beliefs is that an important step Atlanta needs to take — in order to be fully cosmopolitan — is to leverage the arts as an economic and community development engine. He initiated the addition of a cultural tourism department within the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau in 1998 and served as its board chair until 2003. Currently, he is Chairman of the Board for the Midtown Alliance in Atlanta, providing guidance to what has become the arts and cultural district of Atlanta and the poster child for “new urbanism” in Atlanta. A strong proponent for diversity within the arts, Shelton developed the Woodruff’s Celebrate Diversity Through the Arts initiative and has guided its growth over the last four years.

Shelton was awarded the 2004 International Society for the Performing Arts Foundation’s Patrick Hayes Award for life-long achievements. He also serves on the Board of Counselors of The Carter Center; and the Boards of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, National Film Preserve, Russian-American Cultural Foundation and the International Society of Arts Presenters.

Footnote:

Since the opening, the Woodruff Arts Center’s campus has been the cornerstone for the growth of the arts throughout the South and a centerpiece in Atlanta. Prior to the opening of the Memorial Arts Building in 1968, Midtown Atlanta was best know for its unsavory streets and blocks of underutilized land as well as deteriorating residential neighborhoods. Since then 27 buildings representing more than 12 million square feet of space has been built around the Woodruff with an estimated value of $2.5 billion.

Currently, the Woodruff Arts Center is the largest visual/performing arts center in the United States and is one of the four largest arts centers in the country. Over 1 million people visit The Woodruff Center annually, this to increase to almost 2 million with the new facilities, making them one of the top 10 tourist attractions in the state. Visitors are entertained with multiple exhibits at the High as well as over 1200 performances annually with the ASO, Alliance Theatre and 14th Street Playhouse.