Brett Bernardini has spent thirty years building cultural institutions in small American places. He is currently at work on The Country We Make: Rural America, the Arts, and the Architecture of Democracy, an oral history gathered across all 50 states, and is writing Gathering Ground, a dispatch from that fieldwork.

In 1995, he founded the Spirit of Broadway Theater in Norwich, Connecticut, a mill city the state had largely written off, and ran it for twenty-one years. It produced new American musicals — many of them world premieres — in a downtown people were told not to walk through after dark. He started it in an abandoned building while still teaching full time, and later persuaded the city to hand over the keys to its derelict 1917 firehouse, which became the theater’s home for two decades through a $4.5 million redevelopment.

He went on to lead institutions across the country: The Stissing Center in rural Pine Plains, New York, where he grew the operating budget from $880,000 to $2 million in two years and launched a $10 million capital campaign; The Gettysburg Foundation, where he built the advancement architecture for a $50 million national campaign; the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival; The Cape Playhouse; and Theater Harrisburg. He chairs the board of Arts Mid-Hudson, a New York State regranting partner serving three Hudson Valley counties, where he watches public money find its way — and fail to find its way — into small places every year.

He was conservatory-trained at Shenandoah, and at twenty sang the world premiere of Jacob Druckman’s Vox Humana at the Kennedy Center under Mstislav Rostropovich. He taught music for fifteen years in Connecticut classrooms, did graduate work in ethnomusicology and Native American Studies at Wesleyan, and completed executive education in nonprofit management at Harvard Business School.

He lives at Aranya, on Bantam Lake in Morris, Connecticut, and in October, leaves for a year on the road.