TIG Leadership - Arts, Culture, and Museums

Jeremy Foutz

TIG Chair

jeremy [a t] steamworkgroup.com

Using his knowledge and experience in the arts, culture, education, technology, and evaluation fields, Jeremy (he/him) has collaborated with cultural arts and science organizations since 2008 to help them evaluate their work and goals to make them more meaningful and useful. With teaching and evaluation experiences complementing his training in ethnomusicology, Jeremy uses a flexible, syncretic, collaborative, and multidisciplinary approach, regardless of the particular hat worn at the time.

Jeremy is active in local and national evaluation and research associations and is also serving on the leadership council for Multiethnic Issues in Evaluation TIG as part of his passion for equity and improving the field. As a practice partner - with emphasis on practice - he enthusiastically applies the Equitable Evaluation Framework™ (EEF), which "seeks to reimagine the purpose and practice of evaluation by seeding and growing a field to advance equity and expand notions of validity, objectivity, rigor, and embrace complexity."

Besides his work as founder and principal at STEAM Workgroup, Jeremy usually working on several DIY projects going (building furniture, assembling circuit boards), improving his skills to fix something he previously “fixed” (brake calipers, R packages), or outside trying to convince various plants and animals to make food.

Marcel W. Foster

TIG Program Chair

marcel [ a t ] performhy.com

Marcel W. Foster, MPH (they/them), is a health and arts evaluator currently based in Atlanta, home to the Muscogee & East Cherokee Nations. They evaluated health initiatives for clients that include the US Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health.

They additionally serve on the board of Performance Hypothesis, (PH) which prioritizes evaluating arts initiatives with public health impacts. PH proudly consults The Counter Narrative Project, which focuses on shifting the narratives about Black gay men to change policy and improve lives; and also evaluates Out of Hand Theater's efforts to use the performing arts as a tool to increase vaccine confidence, with funding from the CDC.

Marcel has been an enthusiastic member of AEA's Arts, Culture, and Museum TIG since 2018, with two presentations that focused on choreographic methods for community-based participatory evaluation.

Kari Ross Nelson

TIG Communications Chair

kari.ross.nelson [ a t ] gmail.com

Kari is a research and evaluation consultant working in the greater Salt Lake City area with a focus on informal learning contexts. She completed an MA in Museum Studies at San Francisco State University, and after a dozen years as a museum educator recognized the need to be able to understand and demonstrate the effectiveness of educational programming in museums.

Since completing an MS in Instructional Psychology with an emphasis in research and evaluation, she has worked exclusively in this field. She regularly conducts evaluation work at Thanksgiving Point Institute and the Natural History Museum of Utah, and on a consulting basis with other museums in the region. She is a part of the Association of Children’s Museum Research Network and continues to collaborate with peers from that group. Currently, she is a research partner on the Measurement of Museum Social Impact (MOMSI) project. Again, recognizing a need to add rigor to her work, she is pursuing the Interdisciplinary PhD in Evaluation at Western Michigan University.

She is not competitive but does like to challenge myself to do hard things - which she realizes are relative! In 2021, she started a PhD program and worked up to swimming a mile. In 2022, she is working toward doing pushups on my toes, reading the Old Testament, and making a complexly patterned sweater using yarn bough in Norway a few years ago.