How COVID Changed the Arts with Vivian Hua, Tim Lennon and Erin Johnson

Three leaders of Seattle institutions discuss the ways a year without in-person events disrupted worlds and how it transformed how they do their work.

Before the pandemic, it could be easy to take the live arts for granted. In a city like Seattle, on any given night, audiences gathered in all kinds of spaces to take in a performance or a screening. That this part of life would someday come to a halt was unthinkable.

The arts did continue, much of it digital and streaming, but the spaces in our cities remained empty and the future of the organizations that once filled them, uncertain.

Now that audiences are tentatively beginning to gather again, they are returning to a landscape that has been forever changed, for worse and for better.

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, Crosscut arts reporter Margo Vansynghel speaks with the leaders of three Seattle institutions — Vivian Hua of the Northwest Film Forum, Tim Lennon from Langston and Erin Johnson of Velocity Dance Center — about the difficult decisions and innovations that have brought them this far and what the future looks like for their organizations.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Seth Halleran, Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph