Diane Grams

Diane Grams is an artist and assistant professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. "Producing Local Color" (University of Chicago Press 2010) is her second book. It is an investigation of local art worlds found in three Chicago neighborhoods -- Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park. She co-edited and co-authored "Entering Cultural Communities:Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts" (2008 Rutgers University Press)with Betty Farrell.

Here is a little more about her... prior to joining Tulane's faculty, she was the associate director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago (2003-2007), and also taught courses in cultural policy and research methods through the University of Chicago's Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. Among her courses was "Excavating Cultural Policy," a course that involved graduate students in an investigation of the policies behind some of Chicago's murals, sculptures, and beautification projects.

She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Loyola University Chicago and won a Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship to support her research on the Chicago arts. She earned a B.A. in Painting from Indiana University, Bloomington and was a 1980 alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

During her twenty-years working in arts in Chicago, she was the Executive Director of The Peace Museum, Chicago (1992-1998), was named among One Hundred Women Making a Difference in Chicago by Today's Chicago Women in 1989, and was given the 1989 Civil Liberties Award from the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union of Chicago for her work in support of artistic expression. Her paintings have been included in exhibitions in the United States and in South America including: Painted Bride in Philadelphia; Suburban Fine Arts Center, Highland Park (IL); Artemisia Gallery, Chicago; R.H. Love Contemporary, Chicago; Visual Arts Center of Alaska in Anchorage; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and Centro Colombo Americano, Medellin, Columbia, South America.